Severe OneNote performance decline out of the blue - Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite

Question

Severe OneNote performance decline out of the blue - Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite

Max 15

I have been using OneNote on my S6 lite for about 2 years for academic note-taking. In the past day or so, the app has been extremely buggy and laggy. When I write words using my s-pen, they take extremely long to "load" onto the page, and will be moved around when i move the background using the touchscreen. The pen also takes ages to switch colors correctly. The erase function hardly ever works. The touch and drag or shape placing functions are extremely slow as well. I've never experienced lag this severe before. I have confirmed that the s-pen is working fine. Furthermore, I dont seem to notice any lagging issues when using OneNote on my laptop under the same account and same notebooks.

For details, I am using onenote version 16.0.19725.20156 on one UI version 8.0 android version 16. Last google play system update was february 1st. In an attempt to troubleshoot so far, I have cleared the app cache, uninstalled and reinstalled, signed out of and back into my personal microsoft account, altered the app battery useage setting to "unrestricted", turned off battery saver mode, restarted my tablet, closed all other notebooks and deleted an extra 10% of storage space in my onedrive. My tablet is fine on internal storage. None of this helped for more than ~5minutes before the app became extremely slow again.

Considering I have not experienced any performance issues this severe before, is there anyway I can revert any recent updates to recover a functional version of the app for use? Any other troubleshooting tips?

BluSleeper 5 Reputation points

2026-04-10T01:26:38.4166667+00:00

Definitely an issue for quite some time now. Renders the app almost useless and a time sink. Trash job by MS. What the heck are we paying for???

I'm not on Samsung and this is NOT limited to Samsung devices. Using Vivo and other brands these days. Other apps are fine. This ONLY affects One Note!
Rin-L 17,805 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-04-10T09:38:50.9933333+00:00

Hi @BluSleeper

I understand how frustrating this can be, especially when it’s been affecting your day‑to‑day work for some time. If you haven’t already, I’d strongly encourage sharing your feedback directly within the OneNote app, as submitting it there helps ensure it reaches the product team more effectively than posting only in the forum. You can refer: How do I give feedback on Microsoft 365? - Microsoft Support

Thank you for taking the time to speak up. I also sincerely hope that Microsoft takes all community feedback into consideration and gives it the attention needed to continue improving the experience for everyone.
Rohan 85 Reputation points

2026-04-10T10:16:28.6833333+00:00

Thanks for the feedback BluSleeper. I just went to use my full list of bespoke tags (over 50) & found my list has been reset back to the default list of tags after an office update this week. MS just seem to keep on giving which certainly does make us think about finding other systems that are more consistent & reliable.

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BluSleeper 5 Reputation points

2026-04-10T01:26:38.4166667+00:00

Definitely an issue for quite some time now. Renders the app almost useless and a time sink. Trash job by MS. What the heck are we paying for???

I'm not on Samsung and this is NOT limited to Samsung devices. Using Vivo and other brands these days. Other apps are fine. This ONLY affects One Note!
Rin-L 17,805 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-04-10T09:38:50.9933333+00:00

Hi @BluSleeper

I understand how frustrating this can be, especially when it’s been affecting your day‑to‑day work for some time. If you haven’t already, I’d strongly encourage sharing your feedback directly within the OneNote app, as submitting it there helps ensure it reaches the product team more effectively than posting only in the forum. You can refer: How do I give feedback on Microsoft 365? - Microsoft Support

Thank you for taking the time to speak up. I also sincerely hope that Microsoft takes all community feedback into consideration and gives it the attention needed to continue improving the experience for everyone.
Rohan 85 Reputation points

2026-04-10T10:16:28.6833333+00:00

Thanks for the feedback BluSleeper. I just went to use my full list of bespoke tags (over 50) & found my list has been reset back to the default list of tags after an office update this week. MS just seem to keep on giving which certainly does make us think about finding other systems that are more consistent & reliable.

Answer 1

Rin-L 17,805 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi @Max,

I’m really sorry you’re dealing with this. From what you’ve shared, this doesn’t seem to be an issue with your S Pen or the tablet itself. It’s much more likely that you’re running into a performance regression that has shown up in recent OneNote for Android builds on Samsung devices. You’re definitely not alone here, I’ve seen quite a few other Samsung users report very similar lag and responsiveness problems recently, which suggests this is on the software side.

I also want to genuinely thank you for taking the time to walk through all of those troubleshooting steps. They’re exactly the right things to try and often do help, so it’s truly unfortunate that they didn’t resolve the issue in this case. Some users have mentioned that rolling back to an earlier version of OneNote made the app noticeably more usable again. If you’re open to trying that, it may be worth looking through the comments in the related thread and testing an older build from APKMirror to see if it improves the experience for you: One note suddenly lagging on samsung ultra - Microsoft Q&A

Just a quick note to mention that Microsoft is sharing information about APKMirror purely for convenience. These sites aren’t managed or controlled by Microsoft, so Microsoft isn’t able to make any guarantees around the quality, safety, or suitability of the software or information found there. Please take a moment to review and fully understand any potential risks before following suggestions from the link above.

I also hope you’ll understand that this is a user‑to‑user support forum, and I’m just another user trying to help by sharing what information I have. I don’t have the ability to fix or escalate bugs directly, but if the issue continues, it would be really valuable to report it through the OneNote feedback portal so the product team is aware.

If you have any updates, questions, or would like to talk through what you’re seeing, please feel free to reply here. I’m more than happy to continue the discussion with you.

If you find this response helpful, please kindly click “Accept Answer” for this post. This helps pin the thread to top so other users who may be experiencing the same issue can find it more easily, know where to report the problem, or share any additional tips or insights that might also be helpful for you.

Thank you again for your understanding.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Rin-L 17,805 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-23T08:55:12.1866667+00:00

If there’s anything else you’d like to share or add, please feel free to let me know. I’d be more than happy to hear your thoughts.
Rohan 85 Reputation points

2026-03-25T23:01:18.75+00:00

I have had a drastic loss of performance in OneNote for Android as well on multiple devices(HONOR Magic 8 Pro, Samsung Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro & HONOR Magic 6 Pro). As soon as I installed the update last week I noticed the lag, poor response to the app navigation & it loading data. I have messaged the Feedback team twice now & have given feedback via my tablet as well. This issue needs looking in to & resolving as I have multiple engineers using this daily & this is the 2nd major backward move in recent months after the change of the To Do tag as well.

Please look in to & resolve ASAP.
Rin-L 17,805 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-29T08:21:14.6033333+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to share such detailed and real‑world feedback, @Rohan. I’m sorry to hear about the performance issues you’ve been running into, especially given how heavily your team relies on OneNote day to day. I’ve seen similar feedback from other users as well.

Hopefully the product team will take notice of these reports and address the performance regressions in upcoming updates.
Rohan 85 Reputation points

2026-04-04T17:32:27.7733333+00:00

Hi,

When is a resolution to the latest issues the last update has caused?? Been going on for a couple weeks now & now idea when there will be issues resolved.

I have been rolling back versions but even with more reliable versions, I have not had the same reliable OneNote that I was used to for years. The recent changes causing issues & the change of the To Do tag without notice on the PC end have been major failings.
Rin-L 17,805 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-04-05T10:10:24.6233333+00:00

Good day @Rohan, I’m sorry to hear how disruptive the recent updates have been for you.

I’d like to gently clarify, as mentioned earlier, that I’m not part of Microsoft’s product or engineering team. I’m a regular user and community moderator here, so I don’t have visibility into internal timelines or when specific issues related to recent updates may be officially resolved.

That said, if you’re running into additional issues with To Do, I’d strongly encourage you to create a new post and describe the behavior in a bit more detail. This helps keep each topic focused and allows other community members to review it more easily, share their own experiences, and contribute suggestions or workarounds specific to that issue.

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Severe OneNote performance decline out of the blue - Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite

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