How I Finally Fixed Obsidian’s and Omnisearch’s Terrible Performance on Android

I’ve spent way too much time figuring out how to make Obsidian and Omnisearch usable on Android phones, but I finally found the solution.

Omnisearch searches were painfully slow because the plugin had to re-index everything each time I performed a search. Even creating new notes in Obsidian felt sluggish on Android, which I had heard could be due to the Omnisearch plugin.

I thought I’d found the answer when I discovered Omnisearch’s “Save index to cache” setting. Unfortunately, this setting kept turning itself off due to crashes. When I tried to force it to stay enabled, I ended up in a recurring loop of crashes and restarts.

The Real Solution

The root cause on my Pixel 8 was Android’s battery optimization, which was killing Obsidian’s background processes. Here’s how to fix it:

1. Open Settings → Apps → Obsidian
2. Tap “App Battery Usage”
3. Enable “Allow background usage”
4. Tap on “Allow background usage”
5. Select “Unrestricted”

This completely solved my performance problems and made Obsidian dramatically more usable on Android.

Omnisearch Settings Cache settings

With battery restrictions removed, I was still unable to use “Save index to cache” in the Omnisearch settings due to crashing whenever Obsidian tried to save the index. However, because the app now stays open in the background, it only has to index the first time I use Omnisearch after opening the app. After that initial indexing, I can use Omnisearch instantly for subsequent searches.

The bottom line: disable all battery optimizations for Obsidian on your Android phone, and Obsidian with Omnisearch works perfectly.