snap-store categories take too long to populate

Upon further investigation, the categories are populated. But they take a really long time to do so, around a minute, with no clear indication of what's happening.
I still think this is a bug as a new user will probably not wait that long and just think that there is no app in the store.

I update the title to reflect that.

Same bug here. Not 1 minute for me, though. I just counted 15 seconds to populate Utilities.

I'm using the current beta (3.36.0-75-g02a9109) of snap-store while the snapd version is 2.44.5. It takes overall 30 seconds to populate any category on my machine. While the gnome-software took 2-5 seconds max.
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 (Xfce)

Confirming this issue for my install as well. I searched for 30 minutes trying to find why there were no packages in the categories only to find this thread and realize that the issue is the time for the category to populate.

I really thought the program was broken. It didn't occur to me to just sit there with nothing happening on the screen for 30 seconds. Bad UX.

I don't think categories take a ridiculously long time to load, but the lack of activity indication makes one think that something is broken.

I've seen this behavior on snap-store 3.36.0-82-g80486d0 and even the edge version 3.38.0-53-g9c9ab7f.

I want to call out that as the number of applications in a category increases, so does the wait time. For instance the "Art and Design" category loads much quicker than "Games" on my machine. My system is not top of the line (i3-4130 CPU and Radeon RX 580) but I shouldn't require a top of the line processor to load icons for applications. At the very least there needs to be a better indication that *something* is happening when it is loading.