---
title: Your phone reopens the session you had open (mobile)
---

# Your phone reopens the session you had open (mobile)

## What it is

### What it does

On a phone, when you **refresh the page or reopen the app while you have a session open**, Omniscio drops you **straight back into that same session** — not the projects/inbox list you'd otherwise land on — and it paints instantly.

Before this, the phone forgot which session you were viewing the moment you refreshed: it only kept the open session in memory, so a reload dumped you back on the Projects list and you had to find and tap your session again. Now the phone remembers it and takes you right back.

Two everyday cases this covers:

- **Refresh / reopen while reading a session** → you come back to that exact session, with its latest message already on screen (no blank "loading" beat).
- **Tapping a session while the app is still loading** → the session you tapped opens and stays open; the load finishing never yanks you back out or overrides your tap.

## Where to find it

On a phone, in **Web Access**. There is nothing to configure — it is simply what happens when you reload or reopen the app while a session is open.

## How it behaves

### When it applies

- **Mobile / Web Access only.** The desktop app has always restored your place its own way and is unchanged.
- **Always reopens the exact session you had open** — there's no "only if it was recent" cutoff; if you want the inbox instead, back out to it before you refresh (backing out is remembered too).
- If the session you had open was **archived, ended, or deleted** in the meantime, you land on your inbox list instead — never on a blank screen.
- There is no on/off setting in the UI; it just works. (An advanced environment kill switch, `AMC_DISABLE_MOBILE_SESSION_RESTORE`, exists only as a safety valve.)

### How it works (in one breath)

Whenever you open a session on the phone, Omniscio quietly saves which session it is (as a lightweight setting), and that value now travels down with the phone's first-load data. When the app starts, it reads that saved session and — if it's still a live, openable session — selects it and switches straight to the session view, exactly the way tapping it from the list would. Its last agent message rides the same first-load data, so the session shows content the instant it opens instead of waiting on a fetch. A session you tap _during_ loading already claims the screen, so the startup restore sees that and steps aside — your tap always wins.

## Related

### Related

- [mobile-back-gesture.md](mobile-back-gesture.md) — the phone Back gesture and the projects → sessions → session drill-down.
- [mobile-create-on-send.md](mobile-create-on-send.md) — starting a brand-new session on mobile paints instantly too.
- For engineers: the behavior is the "reopen-on-refresh" slice of the mobile-loading contract — the open session is persisted mobile-only by `startMobileActiveSessionPersistence`, carried on the web bootstrap (`lastActiveSessionId`), seeded for instant paint by `applyFocusSeed`, and reopened by the mobile branch of `useDashboardStartupRestore`.