App Intents playlist scanning blocks UI on large collections

Is there an existing issue for this?

• This is a bug in RetroArch frontend
• I have searched the existing issues

Description

Hey all - I've got a pretty large ROM collection (~85k games across about 100 playlists) and I noticed that every time I launch a game, RetroArch basically hangs for a while before anything happens. At first I thought it was a core issue or a bad ROM, spent a bunch of time chasing that down, but it turns out the culprit is the App Intents playlist scanning.

In the logs I can see this right at the end:

[INFO] App Intents: Discovered 103 playlists in /Users/.../RetroArch/playlists/
[INFO] App Intents: Found 85101 games across all playlists

It's scanning every single playlist entry for Siri/Shortcuts integration every time I launch content. On a large collection this takes long enough that it genuinely looks like the app has frozen.

I'm running an M5 Max with 64GB of RAM so this isn't a hardware limitation - it's just that iterating through 85k entries synchronously is going to take a while no matter what.

Would it be possible to either:

• Add a toggle in settings to disable App Intents scanning entirely, or
• Move the scanning to a background thread so it doesn't block the UI

Totally understand if Siri integration is a nice-to-have for most people, but for anyone with a big collection it's a pretty rough experience right now. Happy to help test if a fix goes in.

Expected behavior

Launching content should not be blocked by App Intents playlist scanning. Either the scan should happen in the background or there should be an option to disable it.

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Create a large number of playlists (100+) with many entries (80k+ total)
2. Launch any game from any playlist
3. RetroArch appears to freeze/hang while "App Intents: Found XXXXX games across all playlists" completes

Version/Commit

1.22.2 (Git 69a4f0ea)

Bisect Results

No response

Present in the nightly version

I don't know

Platform & operating system

macOS 26, Apple Silicon (M5 Max)

Affected Cores

All - this happens before the core even starts running

Environment information

No response

Relevant log output

[INFO] App Intents: Discovered 103 playlists in .../RetroArch/playlists/
[INFO] App Intents: Found 85101 games across all playlists

Start at the App Intents playlist-scanning path described in the report and reproduce the delay with a large playlist collection on macOS. The work is done when launching content is no longer blocked by scanning, either through background processing or a way to disable the scan, while the reported playlist discovery behavior remains covered.