DealNTech Mobiles, PCs, and All Things Tech
Spotlight Search is an excellent, well-integrated feature on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. With Spotlight, you can conveniently browse the web for a quick Google search result instead of opening a Browser.
Spotlight has access to your notes, and you can search for notes without needing to open the app. You can also use it for simple mathematical calculations or to search for an installed application.
Spotlight is an index of all the files you store so you can conveniently access your documents and music. All of your system settings are accessible via Spotlight. Furthermore, you can search your browser history and your bookmarks.
There are specific command line tools, too, and there’s the ability to look up the definitions and meanings of words. Spotlight search has been on iOS since iOS 3 in 2009. Every year, the company is tightening the integration and making it more usable and feature-rich.
Spotlight search is highly beneficial, and the fantastic integration makes it far better than Android’s simple search feature.
Unfortunately for iOS users, the feature is relatively slow after iOS 16.3 update. There are many reports of lags and delays when using the feature to search for something.
I noticed the same thing. Ridiculous how slow Spotlight is. I thought it would be better with ios 16.3.
— Mr 8ean (@Mister_8ean) January 29, 2023
This isn’t just a visual consistency error. It’s a significant bug that breaks the usability. The problem isn’t happening only on particular models.
It looks like an issue across all iPhones that run iOS 16.3. That’s not the experience we expect from iOS, highly sophisticated software.
On Twitter, some people report that Spotlight takes nearly 15 seconds to show a result on an iPhone 13 Mini and 14 Pro/ Max running the latest iOS version. There’s also a bug where the keyboard completely disappears, and you can see nothing but Gaussian Blur.
That is downright unacceptable and extremely slow, rendering it unusable. iPhones have world-class chips, and the fact that some take over 10 seconds to load a simple search is dunce-like.
According to other reports, displaying a search result takes over two seconds. While that’s better than fifteen, it’s still not as good as it once was. Spotlight on previous iOS versions was instant, taking no time to show you the search results.
If you type in the app’s name entirely, not partially, and then tap on the search button, the result shows up after 3 seconds.
The most common troubleshooting method is restarting your phone. Restarting clears the cache and solves a lot of system-related minor bugs. It solves the bug for our unit.
It’s unlikely that Apple will issue a public statement acknowledging the problem since that isn’t their style. We could expect a silent fix with one of the upcoming updates to iOS 16; the next one is iOS 16.4.
There are reports of laggy and slow Spotlight since the first iOS 16, and it’s frustrating that no fix is out, even three iterations in. Since we don’t know the scale of people this is happening to, Apple might not be aware of the problems.
If Spotlight search is essential for daily use, we recommend staying on your current iOS version if it works fine. Of course, resetting your device to factory settings is always available.
However, that’s an incredibly long and clunky process that can only be done in an extreme scenario. We don’t recommend going through that hassle.
We hope Apple solves this in a future update, and we’ll keep you updated. Until then, you may convey this problem to Apple Support/ Feedback Forums so they know it.
