Stop Using Spotlight on Your IPhone (and Do It Instead)
Once an essential tool in your iPhone productivity arsenal, Spotlight has become almost unusable in iOS 16. Sometimes it displays search results almost instantly, but most often it takes a few seconds (or more) to complete a search. The lag is especially noticeable on older iPhones, and it’s rather unfortunate to see the inconsistency of a once-reliable tool.
The same feature faces similar issues on Mac, but at least there are alternatives like Alfred and Raycast that make up for it. On your iPhone, you can’t replace Spotlight with an alternative, but there are a few workarounds you can try.
Use your iPhone’s App Library
If you continue to swipe left on your iPhone’s home screen, you’ll find the App Library at the very end . Once there, swipe down to open the search bar and enter the name of the app you want to search for. You will see that this search box instantly loads the results you are looking for. We tried this on a three year old iPhone XS Max that had about 200 apps installed. Results load without delay or long waits every time. You just need to switch your muscle memory from Spotlight to App Library search. More movements are required, but overall the job is done faster. And if you hide or delete all but one of the Home Screen pages , the App Library can be uninstalled in one swipe.
For other types of searches, it’s better to open separate applications and use the search field inside. For example, instead of using Spotlight to search for contacts, you can open the Contacts or Phone apps and search there.
Reduce what Spotlight can show you
You can turn off some potential results that slow down Spotlight. This solution is far from ideal because it reduces Spotlight’s capabilities, but if you really can’t use alternative methods, it’s worth a try. Mind you though, it’s a bit cumbersome. First, you can go to Settings > Siri & Search on your iPhone and disable the following options:
- Show offers
- Show recent
- Show in search
- Show in the spotlight
This will reduce the number of things Spotlight tries to load and may improve performance. If that doesn’t work, the next step is a more tedious option. On the same settings page, scroll down and tap the name of any app. Turn off Show Content in Search to prevent Spotlight from indexing content inside this app. You can repeat this process manually for all apps that you don’t want to be scanned by Spotlight. It goes without saying that you may not want to do this for applications such as Contacts, where you may often need to view detailed information. But once you’re done, your lagging Spotlight should run a lot faster.