Laggy iPad Woes

Laggy iPad Woes: a reader asks…

I have an iPad that’s only a few years old, and works great on everything except one single app (forScore). On that app, the screen response is very slow, sometimes seconds go by before a tap or swipe has any effect. Sometimes when I tap and nothing happens, I tap again, and a few seconds later the app has registered both of my taps, with unpredictable results. My iPad is fully updated on padOS and there’s plenty of free storage space (both on-device and in iCloud) – even the app is updated to the latest version and my Wi-Fi is strong. I should mention this hasn’t always been the case, only somewhat recently, and again, the laggy behavoir is only on that one app. I do have a lot of files in forScore, but none of them are super huge or complicated. Is there an easy solution?

First off, thank you for all the detail you provided in your question, which really helps me get to the root cause of the issue fast. The fact that you only experience this laggy behavoir on a single app is a huge arrow pointing to the app itself as the cause of your woes, not your iPad. Unfortunately, I don’t see an easy solution for you, sorry.

Probably the most effective thing you can do is to complain to the makers of forScore – loudly and often. There are lots of other folks online complaining about similar issues with the app, which point back to a previous Apple padOS update which created the problem in forScore. The developer has been working with Apple to resolve the issue, but so far no solution. Apple apparently isn’t motivated to do anything on their end, leaving it up to the forScore developer to find a way to make their app work well with the current padOS version(s).

Things that other users of forScore have done to try to work around this issue include:

1. Offload most of your files to a cloud storage solution like Dropbox, and only keep your active scores/files in forScore. You do this by exporting the scores, and saving them to your preferred cloud solution. You can always bring them back in when you need them. By keeping your active file list in forScore at less than 20 scores, the app will have less extraneous processing to do and this should eliminate the laggy behavoir.
2. Check that your PDFs aren’t huge files (in terms of file size). Even if you don’t think they’re complicated, if they were saved in a manner that created a relatively huge file, that could be slowing forScore down. If you have PDF editing software (Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF, etc.), you can open the file and then save it in lower resolution to reduce the file size. Along with this, non-native PDF editing software (anything other than Adobe Acrobat) could be introducing complexity to your file without you realizing this. While expensive, Adobe Acrobat really is the best tool for the job of editing PDFs.
3. Along with the above, you could export your marked up PDF from forScore (as an annotated PDF), then go to where you stored that exported file, change the filename, and then import that back into forScore. Same for if you saved 4SC files, since forScore has to access both the PDF and the 4SC file (which contains your annotations) – this extra work can bog down forScore. When you open the annotated PDF in forScore, you’re only accessing the PDF itself.

Unfortunately, you are generally limited to whatever the software developer can do for you. I can’t even guarantee that the above workarounds will…work. You can try them and if they don’t solve the issue for you, you’re back to square one and your only recourse is to pepper the forScore support site with complaints (playing ‘the squeaky wheel’ tune). You do that from within the app by opening forScore’s Tools menu and choosing ‘Support. You can also leave the developer messages on the forScore support web page https://forscore.co/kb/.