Stop Using Spotlight on Your iPhone (and Do This Instead)

Spotlight, once an essential tool in your iPhone productivity arsenal, has become nearly unusable on iOS 16. It sometimes displays search results almost instantly, but more often than not it takes a few seconds (or more) to find things. The latency is particularly noticeable on older iPhones, and the inconsistency of a once-reliable tool is pretty sad to see.

The same feature has been facing similar issues on Mac, but at least there are alternatives — such as Alfred and Raycast — that make up for it. On your iPhone, you can’t replace Spotlight with an alternative, but you can try a couple of workarounds.

Use your iPhone’s App Library

If you keep swiping left on your iPhone’s home screen, you will find the App Library at the very end. Once there, swipe down to open the search bar and type the name of the app you want to find. You’ll see that this search box instantly loads the results you’re looking for. We’ve tried this on a three-year-old iPhone XS Max with about 200 apps installed. The results loaded with no lags or long waits, every time. It’s just a matter of switching your muscle memory away from Spotlight into App Library search. It takes more swipes, but it gets the job done faster overall. And if you hide or remove all home screen pages but one, the App Library can be one swipe away.

For other kinds of searches, you’re better off opening individual apps and using the search box within. For example, instead of using Spotlight to find contacts, you can open the Contacts or Phone apps and search there.

Reduce what Spotlight can show you

You can disable some of the potential results that are slowing Spotlight down. This solution is less than ideal because it reduces Spotlight’s features, but if you really can’t use alternative methods, it’s worth trying. Be warned though, this one is a bit cumbersome. First, you can go to Settings > Siri & Search on your iPhone and disable the following options:

• Show Suggestions
• Show Recents
• Show in Look Up
• Show in Spotlight

This will reduce the things Spotlight tries to load and could improve performance. If that doesn’t work, the next step is a more tedious option. On the same settings page, scroll down and tap on any app’s name. Disable Show Content in Search to stop Spotlight from indexing the content inside that app. You can repeat this process manually for all the apps you don’t want Spotlight to scan. It goes without saying that you might not want to do this for apps like Contacts, where you might often want to see the detailed information. But once you’re done, your laggy Spotlight should be a lot faster.