Mobile app: active desktop session shows up as archived with stale content, then disappears from session list
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in thread ↓
Activity 5 comments · opened Jul 8, 2026
Environment
- Desktop: Claude desktop app (macOS, Darwin 25.5.0), Claude Code session running locally
- Mobile: Claude iOS app, same account
- The desktop session has been used with remote control from the iPhone for several days without issues
Summary
An active Claude Code desktop session stopped appearing in the iOS app's Code session list. It was eventually found under the Archived filter (nobody archived it intentionally), with stale content (transcript frozen at an old point). Unarchiving it does not resync the transcript, and after force-restarting the iOS app the session disappears from the list again.
Steps to reproduce (as observed)
- Use a Claude Code desktop session with remote control from the iOS app across multiple days (long session; context compaction has occurred; a background task/timer was stopped at some point).
- Next day, open the iOS app → Code list: the session is missing from "All".
- The list also shows odd sorting: sessions from May listed at the top, all marked "Disconnected".
- Check the "Archived" filter → the session is there, even though it was never archived by the user.
- Open it → transcript is stale (hours behind the live desktop session).
- Unarchive it → it moves back to the list but content remains stale; reopening does not resync.
- Force-quit and reopen the iOS app → the session is gone from the list again.
What was tried
- Pull-to-refresh on the session list
- Force-quitting/reopening the iOS app (multiple times)
- Restarting the Claude desktop app on the Mac (Cmd+Q, reopen)
- Unarchiving the session on iOS
- Checking sort/filter options
Expected
- An active desktop session should not silently move to Archived on mobile
- Unarchiving should resync the transcript to the live state
- The session should remain in the list after an app restart
Additional context
- The same account/session pair previously hit the known remote-control image-sync issue (#74409); text sync had been working fine until this.
- Session list counters on iOS showed All 72 / Completed 72 / Archived 14 while the actively-running session was missing from "All".
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3 Comments
Update: forking does not resolve the issue
Tried the fork-and-rename workaround (create a new session via fork, rename to a fresh title) on the same desktop session. The newly forked session still does not appear in the iOS app's session list at all — not in "All", not in "Archived" — even after pull-to-refresh.
Additional observation that may help narrow this down: on the same iOS account, sessions that were originally started from the mobile app itself (tapping the + button) show up fine and sync correctly (one such session showed status "Connected" and was usable). It's specifically sessions/forks originating from the macOS desktop app for this particular project directory that never propagate to the mobile session list, regardless of renaming, archiving/unarchiving, or forking.
This suggests the sync gap may be tied to how desktop-originated sessions for this project register with the mobile session list backend, rather than being fixed by any client-side action (restart, fork, rename, unarchive).
Update 2: logout/login also does not resolve it
Tried a full logout and re-login on the iOS app (not just app restart) to force a fresh sync of the session list. After logging back in, the desktop-originated session for this project still does not appear anywhere in the mobile session list (not "All", not "Archived").
Summary of everything tried on the client side, none of which resolved it:
At this point it seems clearly server-side / account-sync related rather than anything fixable from the client. Flagging in case this helps prioritize or points to a specific backend cause (e.g. desktop-originated sessions for this particular project/account not being registered for mobile sync).
Seeing this on my end as well. Good to know that I’m not alone, and this is a bug from Anthropic.
For context: I did a /compact command as the session is reaching 1m. Not sure if this is the cause.
Hope to see a patch on this soon.