Making obsidian ios open quickly enough

November 14, 2023

The iOS app for Obsidian can take a while to open if you try to use it naively, which is a bit frustrating when you just want to take a quick note. I’ve got mine down to being ready to go in about 3 seconds.

There’s two parts of the process you can optimise: loading the workspace and loading plugins. If you have 50 tabs open in your workspace it’s going to load all those files before you can use it, so it’s a good idea to close tabs when you don’t need them.

If you use a lot of plugins, they’ll take a while to load - I think the 70 I have installed on desktop would take up to ten seconds.

I optimise this by using the Plugin Groups plugin, which allows you to define groups of plugins to load together, to set a delay before each group is loaded and to define which devices groups load on. (The documentation is pretty good, but make sure you’ve properly disabled the normal loading sequence for plugins you want to manage with plugin groups and check the list of plugins it doesn’t work with)

I define two groups, and allow a small set of plugins which I’ll want immediately to load normally: the interface plugins (theme settings, Commander, Longform), Templater and Dataview.

Then I define a “delayed” group, which loads 15 seconds after the app opens so that they don’t get in the way of starting a new note when I open the app. This group contains the other plugins I might need.

The third groups is an “other” group, which is defined only to launch on my laptop, containing plugins I’m not generally going to want on mobile and which I suspect of destabilising the mobile app by consuming resources.