[BUG] macOS desktop restart permanently orphans all pre-restart sessions from the Android app — archived, then stuck on "connecting" forever

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Every time the macOS desktop app restarts (most often after an auto-update), every session that existed before the restart becomes permanently unreachable from the Android mobile app — they get moved into Archive on the phone, and un-archiving them leaves them spinning on "connecting" forever with no error. Sessions started after the restart connect from the phone normally.

The sessions themselves are fine: on the Mac they are still in the sidebar, still open, still fully usable. The breakage is only in the phone's ability to attach to them. So the desktop restart appears to permanently orphan a session's mobile/Remote Control attachment rather than re-registering it, and the mobile client interprets that orphaned state as "archived".

This is not a one-off from a botched install (cf. #87335, which was a Windows uninstall/reinstall) — it reproduces on every ordinary desktop restart, and it wipes out all pre-restart sessions at once, not one.

Environment

• Desktop: MacBook Pro (M3), macOS 26.5.2 (build 25F84)
• Claude desktop app 1.32352.0
• Claude Code CLI 2.1.232
• Phone: Google Pixel 10 Pro, Android, latest Claude app from Play Store
• Both clients on the latest available version at time of filing

Steps to Reproduce

1. On the Mac desktop app, start one or more Claude Code sessions and leave them running.
2. On the Pixel, open the Claude app → Code tab. Confirm those desktop sessions are listed and can be opened/steered from the phone. (This works.)
3. Restart the desktop app — quit and relaunch, or let it apply an update and relaunch.
4. On the Mac, confirm the same sessions are still present in the sidebar and still work normally.
5. On the phone, pull up the Code tab again.

Expected Behavior

After the desktop app restarts, sessions that are still alive and usable on the desktop should re-register with the mobile client and remain connectable from the phone — the same way they were before the restart.

Actual Behavior

• All pre-restart sessions have disappeared from the phone's active list and are now under Archive, without any user action.
• Un-archiving one of them puts it back in the list but it never connects: it sits on "connecting" indefinitely. It never times out, never shows an error, never surfaces any diagnostic — it just spins.
• The same sessions on the Mac are completely healthy: visible in the sidebar, openable, still accepting messages.
• Any session created on the desktop after the restart shows up on the phone and connects fine — so account/auth/network/pairing are all working; it is specifically the pre-restart sessions that are dead to the phone.
• Net effect: a desktop app update silently costs me phone access to every session I had open, with no way to recover any of them.

Impact

Because the desktop app updates itself fairly often, in practice any long-running session is guaranteed to lose its mobile connection sooner or later. There is currently no recovery path — un-archive is the only affordance offered, and it does not work.

Possibly Related

• #87335 — desktop reinstall breaks session continuity / Remote Control (Windows, single session, one-time reinstall). Same family of problem, different trigger and blast radius.
• #75941 — sessions auto-archived without user action.
• #86533 — mobile session list stale (different: there new sessions also fail to appear; here new sessions are fine).