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Why is spotlight still messed up?

JoEw

JoEw

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I used to use Spotlight in ios7 to find all my apps on my phone, in IOS8 however it doesn't bring up any results for "app store" and many other terms I search? Should it really be broken this long?
 
Spotlight has been awful for me as well. And it's not my 6 plus because all my devices won't show apps in their search from time to time. It's been this way for me since ios8
 
JoEw said:
I used to use Spotlight in ios7 to find all my apps on my phone, in IOS8 however it doesn't bring up any results for "app store" and many other terms I search? Should it really be broken this long?
Click to expand...

Not just apps, my spotlight shows absolutely nothing. It randomly starts working, and randomly stops. It is plain ridiculous.

I use it mostly to access contacts quickly and it is a pain when it does not work. Hoping there is an update that takes care of this, and requesting developers to report this please.

I am on iOS 8.1.2 on my iPhone 5.
 
It randomly stops working for me on my 6 Plus and rMini 2.

Guess it's a bug within iOS 8 as I never had any issues w/iOS 7.
 
Works fine on my iPad Air. Results for the App Store are there as well!
Perhaps try resetting your device. Or make a backup and remove everything from the device, and finally reload your backup?
 
I use spotlight for nothing but quick app access, so I have had everything but apps turned off for the longest time and it has worked flawlessly for me on iOS 8.
 
About half the time my search results will come up, on both iPad Air and iPhone 6, newest OS update.
 
XTheLancerX said:
I use spotlight for nothing but quick app access, so I have had everything but apps turned off for the longest time and it has worked flawlessly for me on iOS 8.
Click to expand...

Oh, I forgot to add that I wouldn't say spotlight is flawless (in my experience) anymore, because I dug up these screenshots from awhile back. Anyone else seen this?





Everything would look totally normal until I slid down for spotlight. It would turn black and white, and instead of blurring, it would get pixelated/fuzzy, almost as if you turned the quality down on a YouTube video. Oddly enough, as you probably saw, the top search field would still be colored and translucent, just like normal. Not sure what caused this, it's only the second time I have seen it. This happened on both my iPhone and iPad over the course of a day. Restarting the devices like normal fixed it everytime I saw this.
 
Yes this happened to me some times as well. The solution is just to remove translucency, swipe down on the home screen to bring up spotlight, go back to settings and add translucency again, and finally open spotlight.

I can't remember what the cause was right now. But I know that I've known it, so if it comes across my mind again, I'll report it here.
 
Not able to post screenshots ATM, but I have snapped my spotlight not showing apps, showing during others. In any case, spotlight is much slower than it was on IOS7
 
Spotlight is definitely buggy. I would suggest unchecking the Spotlight options you don't need and see if that helps. I trimmed the list and haven't seen a blank results since.

JoEw said:
Not able to post screenshots ATM, but I have snapped my spotlight not showing apps, showing during others. In any case, spotlight is much slower than it was on IOS7
Click to expand...
 
Paco II said:
Spotlight is definitely buggy. I would suggest unchecking the Spotlight options you don't need and see if that helps. I trimmed the list and haven't seen a blank results since.
Click to expand...

I tried unchecking and rechecking and even cut down a couple of the fields I never used, while somewhat helpful the results are still inconsistent.

Considering every person I meet with an iPhone never knows where or how to search in an iPhone, I suppose it is not high on Apple's priority list. But when you have 100+ apps, search is pretty vital.
 
JoEw said:
I tried unchecking and rechecking and even cut down a couple of the fields I never used, while somewhat helpful the results are still inconsistent.

Considering every person I meet with an iPhone never knows where or how to search in an iPhone, I suppose it is not high on Apple's priority list. But when you have 100+ apps, search is pretty vital.
Click to expand...

I agree. Some times spotlight does come in handy and I'm not one to complain but I actually did find myself in a situation the other day where I had to find an app on the fly and couldn't remember which folder I hid it in. Figures spotlight chose that moment to stop searching for apps lol.

It happens more often than not,again for me it's just apps that will go blank and I have everything checked
 
So just last night I tried to search for 'Mail' because I couldn't remember where I had buried the app. No results. Hah!
 
I swiped down spotlight, wanting to listen to "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley. (It's an excellent song!) Anyway, I typed in "dirty" and NOTHING showed up. Absolutely nothing, nada, bupkis.

I growled in frustration, opened the music app, went to songs, brought up the search there and typed "Dirty". My song came up, along with "Dirty Deeds" and all the other expected results.

At this point I felt like throwing my phone across the room, but not as much as later on when I pulled down spotlight again, intending to search for something else, and "Dirty" was already typed in, with guess what... the appropriate search results.

Apple, you used to do better. What happened? 🙁
 
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