[FEATURE] Desktop: show whether Remote Control is active per session — the CLI and mobile both have an indicator, Desktop has none
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been requested yet
- [x] This is a single feature request
What Problem Does This Solve?
The Desktop app gives no indication anywhere in its UI of whether a session's Remote Control bridge is up. Two sessions sitting next to each other in the sidebar — one reachable from the phone, one not — look identical.
Every other surface has an indicator:
| Surface | Indicator |
| --- | --- |
| CLI | /rc active in the footer below the input box while connected; disappears when the connection fails |
| Claude mobile app / claude.ai/code | computer icon with a green status dot when the session is online |
| Desktop | nothing |
So the state is displayed exactly where you cannot act on it, and hidden on the surface where the fix is one command (/remote-control).
In the app bundle, the string "Remote Control" appears once, and it is a log warning from SettingsResolver — there are no user-facing strings for it, and no remoteControlEnabled / isRemoteControlled / remoteControlStatus symbols. The state simply isn't represented in the interface.
Why it matters more than a normal missing affordance
This compounds #84805, where sessions restored after an app restart never re-register despite remoteControlAtStartup: true. Because nothing in the Desktop shows the state, the only way to discover that a session is unreachable is to pick up your phone, look at the session list, and notice an absence. That is what made the underlying bug take days to characterise rather than minutes.
With an indicator, that bug degrades from a silent trap into a visible one-second fix: you would see which sessions are dark and type /remote-control in them.
The value survives the bug being fixed, too. Remote Control can drop for reasons outside the app's control — network changes, the code 4090 takeover in #77022, credential expiry. Today all of those fail silently on Desktop.
Proposed Solution
A per-session indicator, visible without opening the session — a dot or small icon on each sidebar row, mirroring what the mobile session list already shows, so the sidebar answers "which of these can I reach from my phone?" at a glance.
Ideally it is also the control: clicking it enables Remote Control for that session, which would remove the need to type /remote-control at all. And it should follow the CLI's behaviour of disappearing when the connection drops, so it reflects live state rather than "was enabled once".
A single global indicator would be much less useful, since reachability is per session.
Environment
- Claude Desktop: 1.24012.11 (Linux beta, apt)
- Not platform-specific