iPhone Notes become blank/empty in times, you get them back after OS restart

Question

This is taking up the wording and image of the 201911 Apple forum question Apple Notes Blank.

Sometimes when I go to my notes on my phone, the contents of my notes have disappeared.

If you still write or speak in a new note during such a bug, you will not see the text, but the text still gets saved and the note will show up with its first letters in the overview of all notes. If you click on it, it still will be blank. The note saves anything what you wrote or spoke, but without spaces, and after restart, you can work it over. The screenshot below does not show this in full since there is still a space in the first note, but it catches the problem well enough.

After such a bug, how can I get the notes back without restarting the iPhone?

Other official Apple forum questions that deal with the same thing (searched for "notes often empty and need restart iphone"):

• Another 202010 question for an iPhone 11 shows that it is still there for this higher model, see iPhone notes vanish often until I restart phone.
• 202006 My iPhone notes keep going blank after updating to iOS 13.1
• My iPhone notes show up blank all of a sudden
• Same question was asked in the same forum long before 2019 as well, link was removed. This thread was removed only up to four months after asking this question after being out there for many many years... I try not to see a link... I wanted to write down the year of the question in an edit and must see that the link is dead. I can only guess and vaguely remember that "long before" was something old, could have been 2014-2016 or even earlier. Perhaps it was also just removed for its age.

Wrapping up the links, the problem must have been known for a (very) long time.

Answer 1

TLDR:

For example, on an iPhone 7, being in the Notes app showing nothing, double tap the home button, swipe up, open Notes again. That is all you need to do - most of the times.
Sometimes, you will see more than one copy of a note after such an error. Then you can delete one of the two since they are the same. I always save the text of the whole note before doing so, but it has not happened up to now that dropping one of the two copies would drop both altogether, they are two physically different notes, this is not just a duplicate that links to just one note.

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The first answer in that forum from 2019 says it already.

If you run into this bug, you do not need to restart the iPhone. You can just follow the guide at Close an app on your iPhone or iPod touch.

That is, just close the app. I forgot that there were so many apps open, you see them when double-tapping the home button (older iPhones) or when swiping up to the middle. And then swipe through the open apps to find the Notes app and close it by swiping it up.

If you open the Notes app again, the notes will be back without a restart.

Since this problem does not seem to come up with the Apple iCloud Notes, it seems not too far-fetched that this is a bug on the wishlist: "kindly switch to Apple iCloud as the storage for your notes, since the other services are buggy". Aim: locked-in effect, and who knows, perhaps they have some anonymized NLP running? Surely not. Just a little bit alerted. Also strange: the oldest link (I can only guess the age: half a decade or even more) that is listed above was removed only a few months after this question was put here.