Apparently Python multithreading can be used when the bottleneck is hardware like storage, GPU, or even network, so I should use it to help performance as it can be not great. Not sure if async would be the same situation, but it may be what's easiest.

[DrewNaylor]

So yeah, should help a bit with the PinePhone storage being so slow and making things chug when loading icons and making the window take a long time to load all the All Apps list items. Would also be essential for grabbing tile data.

Edit: read some stuff on multithreading vs asyncio, and it seems like asyncio is better for when you have I/O speed limitations so you don't run into deadlocks and stuff.