IOS 11: Allow searching for All Apps

iossearchsiri

Apparently iOS no longer automatically includes apps in the search. Frankly, that’s the only thing I ever search for.

According to the accepted answer in Why is iOS unable to find my apps?, I need to turn on the feature for individual apps in the Siri & Search settings.

Is there a way of enabling all apps to be searched without enabling each individual app?

Best Answer

I was able the get the search setting for all apps turned on by turning off all Siri search features and then turning them back on again.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Disabling ESC Key Yielding Word Suggestions in Preview in OSX 10.11.2

It's the auto completion from the built in spell checker and after a lengthy search I found the solution in Apples Discussion Forums:

defaults write -g NSUseSpellCheckerForCompletions -bool false

Afterwards restart affected programs and Esc just cancels searches again.

iOS App Discovery – Why Siri Can’t Find My Apps

If you are unable to search for apps you could once find, check your settings to see what apps you prevented Search from searching within.

Apple recently changed the behavior of the relevant setting (Siri & Search). Prior to iOS 11 disabling this setting for an app prevented Search from showing results from "inside" the app (e.g. Dropbox listing files). With iOS 11 this behavior has changed: now this setting must be enabled for the app itself to appear in Search results at all.

Note that while this appeared to have been "fixed" in the betas of 11.2 with a new explicit option, "Show App" to search for the app, this seems to have been released (in 11.2.1) as "Suggestions in Look Up" which doesn't achieve the same result.