Zotero on Xiaomi Pad 7: Spinning Circle Issue with Large PDFs

I'm experiencing severe performance issues on my Xiaomi Pad 7 when using Zotero with a large number of PDF files. The app frequently freezes and shows spinning circles during common operations:

Jumping to the table of contents
Using the quick page navigation bar at the bottom
Scrolling or flipping pages too quickly
These crashes force me to restart the app completely to resume reading. This makes it impossible to take notes on the tablet, as the interruptions are too frequent and the workflow becomes unusable for academic research.
  • Happens something similar in my samsung. Just reading gets the app to stop working, coming back to work and then, the message "zotero stopped responding" pops up.
  • Same with me on my Xiaomi Pad 7 - app is unusable just now. I was using the Beta, left that and went back to vanilla - same issue with many PDFs. Tried clearing cache, reinstalling. No good.
  • This sounds similar/the same as the issue I have encountered on a Boox Airnote 5c, although with the e-ink's low refresh rate i'm not certain. Mine is a static refresh symbol in the centre of the page. It appears under similar circumstances to those described in the original post, however.

    I have found that the frequent crashes will also reverse some annotations (if it is possible to create an annotation before it crashes), with Zotero reloading an older synced version after restarting.
  • edited 12 days ago
    I updated Zotero to the latest version on my Xiaomi Pad 7 - still no joy. I then spent an hour using Google Gemini and tried around 20 different things, rolling back each time when it didn't fix anything.

    What did improve things considerably was downloading Android System Webview Beta on the Play Store and then switching to the new Webview provider. (I think I had to enable "Developer Options" to select the beta version - if like me, you have no idea about that, this is the time for asking AI and you will get a nice step-by-step process).

    My Android System WebView was 143.0.7499.192 and the ASW Beta I just installed is 145.0.7632.7 and seems to be better (but still crashes and gives swirly icons when I push things or change the appearance settings). I also tried ASW Dev but it didn't seem as stable as Beta.

    My appearance settings are continuous, single, vertical, fit and automatic. When the swirly icon appears or the app crashes, I swipe up and close the app, reopen and click on the file again and can go again. At least it might be usable now. I'll update if anything is different.

    Hope this helps someone reading this!
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