Though rare, app crashes are frustrating and can happen during import, export, opening documents, or launching the app. We regularly update the app to improve stability, but here are some steps you can try to resolve crashes.
Things to try first
For Apple
Please try each of the following first, especially when the crashes seem random:
- Force-quit the app and relaunch it.
- Force-quit other inactive apps (e.g. video apps).
- Restart your device.
- Update your Goodnotes version, as the App Store can be slow to do this for you automatically. Simply open Goodnotes App Store page and choose Update, if that button is available.
- Update your iOS/iPadOS version. See also Goodnotes and iPadOS beta versions.
If you're working on documents that have a large number of pages/strokes or that were created from large PDFs (e.g. planners, medical textbooks) and notice the app having some difficulty rendering them, those documents can be causing memory errors that might lead to random crashes. Please try these suggestions.
- Open those documents one at a time and close any unused ones, especially those in Split View or Slide Over.
- Disable Auto Backup, or leave Auto Backup enabled with .goodnotes as the only Auto Backup format. Generating PDFs demands much more memory and could crash the app.
- Tap the Search icon near the top-left corner after you've imported one such PDF, and wait until there's no "Indexing..." message before continuing working on it. Being an intensive task, indexing makes every piece of your typed and handwritten content searchable, so exporting it to PDF during this process, for example, might crash the app.
- Disable "Index PDF and Handwritten Notes" in Goodnotes menu > Settings > Handwriting Recognition.
- (iOS / iPadOS) First, perform a Manual Backup to backup your notes. Then, Offload the app (DO NOT Delete or Remove app): go to device Settings > General > iPad/iPhone Storage > Goodnotes > Offload App. This might take a while. After that, tap "Reinstall App". Your Goodnotes library will be placed back.
- Use an optimized version of the PDF.
For more suggestions, please see Performance and Stability Troubleshooting for Goodnotes for iOS/iPadOS/macOS
For Android, Windows, and Web
Please see [Android, Windows and Web] Troubleshoot Performance and Stability Issues.
The app crashes on launch
For Apple
Your library might be corrupted. We might be able to recover it if you send it to us as per the instructions here: Why is the app crashing on launch?
For Android, Windows, and Web
See [Android, Windows, and Web] I am having trouble launching the app. What should I do?
The app crashes when opening a specific document or exporting it to a PDF
There might be memory issues when the app is working on that document.
If it's an imported PDF document, the export failure is likely due to how the original PDF was encoded. In that case, it's advisable to compress the original PDF and import the compressed PDF going forward.
For Apple
If the document is synced to iCloud or Goodnotes Cloud and you have a Mac, you can use Goodnotes for Mac to see the document, then retry exporting it there. Otherwise, you can export groups of pages, and use an online tool to merge them back together.
If you can't export the document to a PDF, please send the document in .goodnotes format to us. You can upload it to your own cloud storage and provide us with the link.
For Android, Windows, and Web
Please share the document with us: [Android, Windows, and Web ] Share notebooks via link sharing
The app crashes when importing a specific file
If it's a large file, your device has likely run out of memory (RAM) during the process.
Please send us the file.
The app crashes with or without a pattern
Please send us details about the crash.