very slow android app when starting and editing notes

[NikHaliasos 6]

greetings to the community. I am attaching a video that shows how slow the andoird app is on a fairly new phone Xiaomi poxo X3 with latest updates.

I am a paying user but unless you have any great suggestions it seems rather unusable. by the way, the legacy android app does not log in anymore with the latest android os updates so we are stuck

 

Nik

[PinkElephant 8,261]

Ooooops ….

Quite a convincing video, thanks for posting.

Since I don’t own any Android device, I just want to confirm one thing: The EN app is way faster on our 2014 iPad Air 2, and as well on our 2015 iPhone 6S+. It is absolutely usable (though slower than on newer hardware) on these pretty aged devices. 

Without knowing if it is going to help, I would issue a support ticket, and send them the video once the support ticket is answered.

[agsteele 2,967]

I am increasingly convinced that these Android performance issues are somehow connected to the device hardware and configuration.  I seem to see the complaints most commonly from Samsung users and now a Xiaomi.  It is of no comfort that I can report the opposite experience on my OnePlus 8 device.

Definitely a support ticket but I fear that the solution may be sometime coming. The vast number of different Android-based devices makes diagnosis much more challenging.  Add to this two versions of Android and the fact that many manufacturers tweak the basic Android to suit their equipment and the challenge becomes even greater.

Of course the EN app needs to work and it isn't the fault of the device owner - just a recognition of how challenging this all is. I know a couple of app developers that used to refuse to develop for Android because of the impossibility (as they saw it) of testing for every possible option.

[topcorner18 2]

I am experiencing the exact same thing on my Google Pixel 4a.  Slow to load notes, slow to respond to keyboard entries as show in the above video.  Sometime takes 20 seconds to load a note.  Getting to be a useless app.  Is anyone from Evernote looking into this issue?  I find it hard to believe they are not testing against the flagship phones for android that are made by Google.

[PinkElephant 8,261]

Although nobody from EN has confirmed it, I am pretty sure this is high on their agenda. 

The problem with Android is probably there are a lot of manufacturers, usually modifying their Android with additional apps and settings. Plus the update policy is mostly inadequate, from no updates to only a few, late and incomplete.

This is no excuse for a slow performance, but it may explain why it is (obviously) hard to crack.

Watching at the market share the Pixel would not be high up on my agenda for testing.

[ehrt74 240]

It would surprise me if this is related to the Android version of the manufacturer. In order to use the Google apps, Android phones have to pass a rigorous test suite. This ensures binary compatibility with Android apps. Unless the programmer is breaking out of the vm and writing C or C++ code, the device (and versions of the operating system after the version the developer chooses to support) have little effect. Two android phones are much more similar for a programmer than two windows computers, for example, or two different generations of macbook.

This is how Google stops companies from forking Android and creating incompatible copies.

My intuition is that this depends on the number of notes stored or the size of notebooks or attachments in files or something like that.

[PinkElephant 8,261]

… or on the moons position related to the sun, or Sirius crossing the belt of Aquarius up to down, or whatever.

We already had some hints that maybe 3rd party keyboards play a role - something that is popular on Android and much less so on iOS.

Or it is simply the framework that works better on iOS than on Android.

Where I disagree: It is a fact that many Android makers put a lot of additional stuff on the devices, often stuff that calls home a lot, often stuff that is as hard to remove as malware (I think in fact it IS malware). Every piece of this ***** can have an effect.

Then you can sideload apps not checked and approved by Google. There are many examples of „free“ apps that do interesting things after being installed from „alternative“ app sources.

And then - I can only repeat it- the update status of Android devices is a plain chaos, depending on the makers to roll out updates to their clients (or not).

Personally I hope the EN team gets it sorted out - the sooner the better.

[NikHaliasos 6]

i can understand the issues with variants of android os and phone providers. It is important to note though the following:

-i have trialled the EN app with a factory reset of xiaomi. The behaviour is the same. Also the behaviour is the same even if i log in as a new user with zero notes and attachments. Also i have a samsung S10+ device and an OPPO3T. I face the same problems. Actually there are few more bugs when the web clipper does not engage unless i run the app first for example

-EN is not the only app in appstore, so the same issues with multiple android os and models are faced by all software houses. So this is not an excuse

-i have been a paying user since 2009: the app has worked very well during updates of EN and android for 10 years. Now new features arrive with the new app that render the essence of note taking of  EN unusable for some of us. 

-if these features are programmatically cutting edge and cause instability to a considerable number of users (note the current rating/reviews on google play store) then you either do not go live with the features or you maintain also a stable older version (by the way the legacy EN app stopped logging in to the EN server a month ago so we cannot use it anymore)

-all the above reduces credibility towards the company,  causing doubt to a user willing to integrate a piece of software in daily workflow and then one day after years have to find a replacement or face time lost and downtime in our professional activities

I have raised a ticket but i am not hoping much of a solution as the reports of similar problems are too many and we know from our experience as IT users for years that this indicates a flawed project that went live too quickly with developers trying to firefight bugs. Will keep you posted if support team offers a solution.

 

[agsteele 2,967]

I know that the EN Dev's are working performance issues. Nobody explains the challenges to provide an excuse - just to understand the possible reasons. 

[matej1990 199]

10 hours ago, NikHaliasos said:

EN is not the only app in appstore, so the same issues with multiple android os and models are faced by all software houses. So this is not an excuse

Exactly! My guess is that Evernote does not have a good Android dev team or they have a very limited resources for Android version of the app. I don't see any other explanation any more.

[absolvd 1]

I am having the same issue on my Pixel 5a, which I have had since September. The app worked fine prior to updating to Android 12 several weeks ago. I have a large volume of notes, but this has been the case for many years and has never been an issue previously. The EN app is up to date (version 10.20) and I have given/changed the app permissions to no avail. 

[Alxa 483]

10 hours ago, matej1990 said:

Exactly! My guess is that Evernote does not have a good Android dev team or they have a very limited resources for Android version of the app. I don't see any other explanation any more.

+1 I am suffering of the exact same issues on two Samsung devices. EN10 is the exact only app  I am using struggling to come to any speed whereas every other software works pretty fluent. After EN for 11 months out there nothing but limited/unsufficient resources in dev can explain such a shameful state of the app. Oh man, the green elephant does not deserve this degree of neglect 😔

[Graham Gott 17]

After suffering the same problems as noted by many others, I believe the biggest problem with V10 is the fact that there is no background sync.

Versions prior to V10 used to sync in the background (if set to do so) even when closed so when you opened the app everything that had been updated on other devices was there.  V10 app seems to have nothing updated since it was last opened so it takes many minutes just to catch up. I have a poor internet in my area so the lag is far longer than others have reported. If OneNote had a decent tagging system I would have abandoned Evernote ages ago...

[dbvirago 509]

I've had the same Android since before v10. For many months it was virtually unusable. But other than the caveat of making sure an update isn't required before going out, or installing and allowing it to sync up before you do, it's been opening quickly lately, < 5 seconds. It's if I want to find and pull up a note inside a notebook where it gets flaky. It may work as expected, or it might take over a minute between clicking on the notebook and seeing the list of notes inside. 

Until they get all this fixed, the key is learning and using the Home page effectively. 

Having said that, with all the talk of progress they've made and work in progress, there is still no excuse for these apps to still be in this shape well over a year after the very  premature release. 

[Graham Gott 17]

Right, after several more attempts at installing the old android app and not being able to log in, I cleared everything and re-installed V10.20.

My inbox was populated with a load of notes from 3 days ago.... WTF??

It took a further 12 minutes before it sync'd to my current notes. Where is it getting it's sync info from? 

[Alxa 483]

Yes, this is a totally weird behaviour since EN 10. It plays through a queue of former changes instead of just syncing the stuff which is actual right in that moment. That queue, if long, lasts forever on Android.

[Graham Gott 17]

5 hours ago, Alxa said:

It plays through a queue of former changes instead of just syncing the stuff which is actual right in that moment. That queue, if long, lasts forever on Android.

Ah, I never thought of that. That must be why it takes so long to sync

[ehrt74 240]

On 11/7/2021 at 4:41 PM, PinkElephant said:

… or on the moons position related to the sun, or Sirius crossing the belt of Aquarius up to down, or whatever.

We already had some hints that maybe 3rd party keyboards play a role - something that is popular on Android and much less so on iOS.

Or it is simply the framework that works better on iOS than on Android.

Where I disagree: It is a fact that many Android makers put a lot of additional stuff on the devices, often stuff that calls home a lot, often stuff that is as hard to remove as malware (I think in fact it IS malware). Every piece of this ***** can have an effect.

Then you can sideload apps not checked and approved by Google. There are many examples of „free“ apps that do interesting things after being installed from „alternative“ app sources.

And then - I can only repeat it- the update status of Android devices is a plain chaos, depending on the makers to roll out updates to their clients (or not).

Personally I hope the EN team gets it sorted out - the sooner the better.

The update status is here irrelevant. AFAIK evernote v.10 uses the web-view component. This is updated over the play store and every Android device using Android 5 upwards gets the newest version within minutes of it being released.

Also: almost nobody sideloads apps. 

[PinkElephant 8,261]

If nobody sideloads, I don’t understand the frequent warnings about Android apps from shady sources that drop a lot of *****- and malware when installed. Technically I think you could even call the install of an apk-file with EN Android legacy a sideload. Would not work on any iOS device, if not jailbreaked before.

[ehrt74 240]

16 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

If nobody sideloads, I don’t understand the frequent warnings about Android apps from shady sources that drop a lot of *****- and malware when installed. Technically I think you could even call the install of an apk-file with EN Android legacy a sideload. Would not work on any iOS device, if not jailbreaked before.

yes, that is an example of a side-load. It is exceedingly rare. 

Also, google play services scans all apps on the device and disables or removes harmful apps, no matter how they are installed.

[PinkElephant 8,261]

Personally I would not like my OS provider scanning my devices for what is installed, and what of it might be dangerous. We will see where iOS goes - if it is forced to open for alternative stores, the secure little world it is now will be in danger.

[ehrt74 240]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

Personally I would not like my OS provider scanning my devices for what is installed, and what of it might be dangerous. We will see where iOS goes - if it is forced to open for alternative stores, the secure little world it is now will be in danger.

Apple already knows what is installed on your iPhone and your mac. there was a case recently where mac users couldn't start a single program because the OS phones home on every program start to check if the user has the rights to start it and the server at apple was overloaded.

I very much hope that iOS does scan your phone to check for malware. Enough malware is distributed through the apple store. In one famous example many thousands of apps were compromised and then downloaded some 200 million times and apple did nothing (not even warning the users) for 2 weeks. I hope they've improved since then (it was a number of years ago).

[PinkElephant 8,261]

I am controlling pretty closely the traffic from my home network into the internet. Nope, starting system and Apple apps works without creating network traffic to Apple, both iOS and MacOS. There is network traffic, little wonder, but not to make things work.

If an app depends on a server to answer on startup, it is the workings of the app, not of Apple controlling the devices. EN is a good example - either you were logged in before going offline, or you can't get it working without a server connection. But this is the EN app making sure who is who before opening the database when offline.

With malware on Apple devices: It usually is removed by another version. There has been one reported case where Apple really removed something by remote control: Zoom had installed a web server on the Mac to make Zoom work there. It was an unpatched old version of it, and it endangered the whole computer by creating a backdoor. Even when you uninstalled Zoom, the web server prevailed on the Mac. Simply a drastic fail by Zoom to deliver such a ***** with their software. In this case Apple did in fact not wait for patches to trickle down - they removed that web server directly.

To see malware distributed by the PlayStore I don't need to go back several years. This is not the fault of Google - all companies have the risk that a supply chain attack is not detected before the software reaches the end user.

[jcg42 0]

On 11/7/2021 at 5:43 AM, topcorner18 said:

I am experiencing the exact same thing on my Google Pixel 4a.  Slow to load notes, slow to respond to keyboard entries as show in the above video.  Sometime takes 20 seconds to load a note.  Getting to be a useless app.  Is anyone from Evernote looking into this issue?  I find it hard to believe they are not testing against the flagship phones for android that are made by Google.

Exact issue on my Pixel 5a, except I've been staring at the add note screen now for 5 minutes with "Loading..." displayed. Editing notes is possible, and it is functional. Just takes forever (literally, I've waited an hour some times). Adding a new note from the menu, or adding a web clipping through sharing, and it is stuck forever - adding a new note lets you type the Title and body, but never presents a highlighted check mark to finish the note. 

For me, this began sometime in October and due to carpal tunnel surgery I've not used it again until recently and noticed it was still happening. Uninstalled, reinstalled. Wiped phone and reconfigured to no avail.

[quattro 0]

Hey all, I've been experiencing these same lag issues and finally stumbled across something that has really made a significant improvement... disabling Location Access for EN. That's it. 

[Alxa 483]

Hi there. Thank you for sharing your discovery. Checked this on my Samsung A50 and Tab A. Could not experience any improvement on that devices unfortunately. On which devices are you running EN?

[quattro 0]

25 minutes ago, Alxa said:

Hi there. Thank you for sharing your discovery. Checked this on my Samsung A50 and Tab A. Could not experience any improvement on that devices unfortunately. On which devices are you running EN?

I'm using EN on an LG v50 Thinq. 

Another possible solution is to purge and re-download all local notes.

Go to Settings - Offline Notebooks. Select Do Not Download Notebooks and go back one screen. Then return to Offline Notebooks and (re)enable Download All Notebooks or Download Selected Notebooks. 

[ha-kg 21]

10 hours ago, quattro said:

I'm using EN on an LG v50 Thinq. 

Another possible solution is to purge and re-download all local notes.

Go to Settings - Offline Notebooks. Select Do Not Download Notebooks and go back one screen. Then return to Offline Notebooks and (re)enable Download All Notebooks or Download Selected Notebooks. 

 

 

As per my experience thgis is not a good solution. 

Because the new download will take several weeks. I have many notebooks which I startet for offline use a long tome ago, and they are still not downloaded completely.

[Coffee First Thing 112]

On 11/9/2021 at 5:58 PM, Graham Gott said:

Right, after several more attempts at installing the old android app and not being able to log in, I cleared everything and re-installed V10.20.

My inbox was populated with a load of notes from 3 days ago.... WTF??

It took a further 12 minutes before it sync'd to my current notes. Where is it getting it's sync info from? 

This has happened to me, too, on my Android phone. Notes sync days later.

[eric99 1,008]

On 11/7/2021 at 1:36 PM, PinkElephant said:

 

The problem with Android is probably there are a lot of manufacturers, usually modifying their Android with additional apps and settings. Plus the update policy is mostly inadequate, from no updates to only a few, late and incomplete.

This is no excuse for a slow performance, but it may explain why it is (obviously) hard to crack.

Watching at the market share the Pixel would not be high up on my agenda for testing.

I thought that the very reason to write an electron apps is: "write once, run everywhere" 😉

[Alxa 483]

Exactly that was the motivation Evernote wanted the user to believe. Not very surprisingly the Electron framework turned out to be the sluggish prison the Evernote app is living in since 12.2020 from the very beginning. Man, we are almost in 2022 now. I can see no way, they could evolve a really future proof product from out of this locked-in position. Adding features in a sluggish and unresponsive framework for what? I am really sorry, 13 months of going down, now rating at 3.4 😞  the green elephant did not deserve this disaster.

[PinkElephant 8,261]

Just need to look at the statistics - versions used of Android vs. iOS.

Usually a majority of iOS devices run the latest version, at least if you wait a little after the major fall update.

A lot of Android devices never get a major new release. If they update, it happens late, and it is often only 1 or 2 generations before they are abandoned. This seems to be changing now slowly, but there is still a big difference.

However since this is a known fact I expect a software company to handle it.

P.S. AFAIK the mobile apps are not running on Electron, but a similar framework for mobile use.

[eric99 1,008]

45 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

However since this is a known fact I expect a software company to handle it.

Exactly, and to be more specific, these differences should be abstracted by the electron platform, that's their only reason of existence.

To be honest, I'm also frustrated by the slow android app: just taking a picture ( in photo mode) takes 5 seconds, then another 8 seconds to put it in the note. It takes 13 seconds just to take a single photo! My native android  takes and saves a hundred pictures per seconds! 

So V10  is more than a 1000 times slower than my native camera app for doing nothing  (just in photo mode, no processing required).  This breaks my major use case on my android phone: taking quick notes on the fly. 

[Coffee First Thing 112]

7 hours ago, eric99 said:

Exactly, and to be more specific, these differences should be abstracted by the electron platform, that's their only reason of existence.

To be honest, I'm also frustrated by the slow android app: just taking a picture ( in photo mode) takes 5 seconds, then another 8 seconds to put it in the note. It takes 13 seconds just to take a single photo! My native android  takes and saves a hundred pictures per seconds! 

So V10  is more than a 1000 times slower than my native camera app for doing nothing  (just in photo mode, no processing required).  This breaks my major use case on my android phone: taking quick notes on the fly. 

I have Classic Evernote running on two phones, and New Evernote running on two other Android devices. The speed difference is maddening. 

[eric99 1,008]

On 12/30/2021 at 12:38 AM, Coffee First Thing said:

I have Classic Evernote running on two phones, and New Evernote running on two other Android devices. The speed difference is maddening. 

Exactly,  I have the impression that V10 developers don't give a sh*t about performance: it looks like they run the heavy processing for automatic mode in the simple photo mode as well, instead of optimizing the general use case for taking plain pictures.  Developers should be ashamed to release this kind of slow software.  While EN needs 13 seconds to take a single picture, gaming software today renders extremely complicated scenes at full resolution at 200 fps, sometimes each individual voxel with physics calculated in software  ("Teardown").

So, this generation of electron developers got completely disconnected from reality. They don't know anymore how computers really work underneath. This is very bad for the planet because it forces users to buy new devices every two years and  consumes a lot of energy and other resources as well.

[ehrt74 240]

On 12/29/2021 at 4:52 PM, PinkElephant said:

Just need to look at the statistics - versions used of Android vs. iOS.

Usually a majority of iOS devices run the latest version, at least if you wait a little after the major fall update.

A lot of Android devices never get a major new release. If they update, it happens late, and it is often only 1 or 2 generations before they are abandoned. This seems to be changing now slowly, but there is still a big difference.

However since this is a known fact I expect a software company to handle it.

P.S. AFAIK the mobile apps are not running on Electron, but a similar framework for mobile use.

The mobile apps use react native. As far as I know this uses the webview component. This is a part of the operating system which is updated over the play store. The same version is shared by 99.9% of Android devices. Whenever a bug is fixed in the webview component, a delta is quickly pushed to the play store. There is no need to wait for a monthly update or download 2 GB. This happens automatically in the background.

 

Android updates are not like iOS updates. On iOS updates are monolithic updates of the whole operating system. Android is made of smaller parts which are updated over the play store. The core operating system is a lot smaller than iOS. 

[AB66 0]

On 11/7/2021 at 6:43 AM, topcorner18 said:

I am experiencing the exact same thing on my Google Pixel 4a.  Slow to load notes, slow to respond to keyboard entries as show in the above video.  Sometime takes 20 seconds to load a note.  Getting to be a useless app.  Is anyone from Evernote looking into this issue?  I find it hard to believe they are not testing against the flagship phones for android that are made by Google.

I also have a Pixel 4a add am facing the same problem. It takes 20s+ before I can add to a note. I'll have to move out of Evernote of this continues!

[Alxa 483]

There has been no substantial increase in app performance for months. Now been waiting for over a year .. in tech industry this is eternity. I doubt they are motivated nor capable of putting things right at all. We will probably never see a clean and fast performing EN as with native legacy client again. For new users relying on Android devices I would suggest not to start using EN at all because of this. There are more performant note taking clients on Android out there.

[quattro 0]

2 hours ago, Alxa said:

There has been no substantial increase in app performance for months. Now been waiting for over a year .. in tech industry this is eternity. I doubt they are motivated nor capable of putting things right at all. We will probably never see a clean and fast performing EN as with native legacy client again. For new users relying on Android devices I would suggest not to start using EN at all because of this. There are more performant note taking clients on Android out there.

Well said Alxa.  This degradation in performance has ruined the EN experience.

80% of my notes are text only yet there is still very significant lag compared to the legacy code app.  I can only imagine how infuriating it is for those users with more robust note files.

What other clients are you evaluating?  I've begun doing the same, looking at Obsidian and Nimbus rn. 

Related Sidebar - My largest issue w/EN mobile is that an open note will ALWAYS revert back to the home screen, unless the screen is kept active.  The only way to stop this is if the note is in Edit mode, and even that state won't hold it forever.  (This is running in standard battery mode, with no restrictions for EN.)  Additionally, this leads to accidental edits. For my workout today, I had to re-open the exact same note at least 20 times where as in the past it would simply remain open until I moved away from it or closed out EN.   Same use case when cooking and working on my car... these notes used to stay open and now, when the screen times out, EN automatically reverts to the home screen.

This behavior is a distinct change from the previous UX, a clear sign of a product mgr / dev team not concerned with users that rely on EN for extended use on mobile.

[Alxa 483]

On 2/20/2022 at 11:38 PM, quattro said:

What other clients are you evaluating?  I've begun doing the same, looking at Obsidian and Nimbus rn. 
 

At the moment I am using a Nimbus account side by side to EN10 to hold the most important information in parallel on Android. So in any case of a subsequent fail of EN10 when on the go, I can access the needed stuff there. But this needs pretty much manual uploading the ENEX files regularly....ufff

For my most important everyday carry mobile phone I (painfully) decided to roll back to EN 8.13.3 for good - support had to grant access to my IP for the login to allow - and now I have at least one Android with an EN 8.13.3 running fast like hell again, background synchronized offline notebooks, pretty instant note display and capture...it is all there again. Love it so much! 🙂

The downside is, that the new features like tasks or home are dismissed that way...but for me that pays off nevertheless.

[Coffee First Thing 112]

1 hour ago, Alxa said:

At the moment I am using a Nimbus account side by side to EN10 to hold the most important information in parallel on Android. So in any case of a subsequent fail of EN10 when on the go, I can access the needed stuff there. But this needs pretty much manual uploading the ENEX files regularly....ufff

For my most important everyday carry mobile phone I (painfully) decided to roll back to EN 8.13.3 for good - support had to grant access to my IP for the login to allow - and now I have at least one Android with an EN 8.13.3 running fast like hell again, background synchronized offline notebooks, pretty instant note display and capture...it is all there again. Love it so much! 🙂

The downside is, that the new features like tasks or home are dismissed that way...but for me that pays off nevertheless.

You can set up IFTTT to create a new note in Nimbus every time you add a note in Evernote. It's not perfect, but that can be helpful. 

[Graham Gott 17]

On 2/28/2022 at 10:03 PM, Alxa said:

For my most important everyday carry mobile phone I (painfully) decided to roll back to EN 8.13.3 for good - support had to grant access to my IP for the login to allow - and now I have at least one Android with an EN 8.13.3 running fast like hell again, background synchronized offline notebooks, pretty instant note display and capture...it is all there again. Love it so much! 🙂

I've tried many times to roll back to EN version 8.13.3 but have never been able to log in. I assumed it was left over code from V10 that was preventing it. I never assumed that Evernote would be blocking my IP address.  How did you go about doing this?

Legacy & Web both work & sync nicely but now both PC V10 & Android V10 refuse to sync - even with each other

[Alxa 483]

2 hours ago, Graham Gott said:

I've tried many times to roll back to EN version 8.13.3 but have never been able to log in. I assumed it was left over code from V10 that was preventing it. I never assumed that Evernote would be blocking my IP address.  How did you go about doing this?

Legacy & Web both work & sync nicely but now both PC V10 & Android V10 refuse to sync - even with each other

Hi, yes actually Evernote seems blocking Android devices which are "supported" by the new EN10 from login via the legacy EN8.13.3 Android client. If you are experiencing that strong problems on Android you could ask support to grant access to EN8.13.3 for your device and give them your actual IP (IPv4 worked in my case). You could also refer to the forums. There a quite some postings on this topic. If they approve, you are able to login within 1-2 days afterwards. Once logged in, the IP can change. No problem. But you should never log out 😉