flutter doctor/flutter daemon hangs forever on macOS when Spotlight mdfind is unresponsive (AndroidStudioValidator has no timeout) #189177

Summary

On macOS, flutter doctor (and therefore flutter daemon, which runs the same
workflow validators on startup) can hang indefinitely and never return if the
system's Spotlight indexer (mdworker/mds_stores) is busy or unresponsive.

This causes IDEs (VS Code / IntelliJ Dart-Code plugin) whose "Flutter Daemon"
depends on this call succeeding within a reasonable time to fail to start.
Since the underlying process never actually exits or times out, the extension
retries forever, producing an infinite start-up loop.

Root cause

AndroidStudio.allInstalled() in
packages/flutter_tools/lib/src/android/android_studio.dart calls:

final ProcessResult spotlightResult = globals.processManager.runSync(<String>[
  'mdfind',
  'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier="com.google.android.studio*"',
]);

This is a synchronous, blocking call with no timeout. If mdfind
doesn't return (e.g. because mds_stores/Spotlight indexing is stuck — which
can happen after macOS updates, or on large projects with heavy file churn in
build/, .dart_tool/, ios/Pods/, etc.), this call blocks the entire
flutter_tools process forever.

There is a try/catch for ProcessException right below it, but that only
guards against mdfind failing to start — not against it hanging.

Steps to reproduce

1. Get the system into a state where Spotlight is unresponsive, e.g.:
   • mds_stores pinned at high CPU doing a long re-index (observable via
     Activity Monitor / ps aux | grep mds)
   • or simply confirm mdfind never returns:
     timeout 8 mdfind 'kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier="com.google.android.studio*"'
     exits with code 124 in this state.
2. Run flutter doctor -v, or open a Flutter/Dart project in an IDE so it
   starts flutter daemon.
3. Observe that flutter doctor prints only the "Flutter" section and then
   hangs forever; the Flutter Daemon in the IDE never finishes starting and
   the extension retries indefinitely.

Confirmed on this machine by sampling the hung flutter_tools.snapshot doctor -v process (sample <pid>): the thread is blocked in dart:io Process.start, and its only child process is:

/usr/bin/mdfind kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier="com.google.android.studio*"

Expected behavior

The Spotlight query is explicitly a "nice-to-have" per the existing comment
in the code. It should not be able to hang flutter doctor/flutter daemon
forever. The call should have a bounded timeout (a few seconds) and fall back
to the already-discovered candidate paths on timeout, the same way it already
falls back on ProcessException.

Environment

Flutter 3.44.5 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision f94f4fc76b (2026-07-06)
Engine • revision 83675ed276
Tools • Dart 3.12.2 • DevTools 2.57.0

• macOS 26.5.2 (25F84), darwin-arm64
• mdutil -s / reports "Indexing enabled."
• mds_stores observed pinned near 100% CPU for an extended period during
  reindexing

Suggested fix

Wrap the mdfind call with a bounded timeout (e.g. Process.start +
Future.timeout, killing the process on timeout) and treat a timeout the
same as the existing ProcessException fallback path.