Archiving/unarchiving chats stops syncing between desktop and Android apps

[Rumperuu]

Using a supported version?

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates.
• I am using Signal-Desktop as provided by the Signal team, not a 3rd-party package.

Overall summary

Archiving and unarchiving chats on the Signal Android app or the Signal desktop app frequently stops syncing across devices, with no obvious cause.

This is a recent regression, as I only started noticing it this week. I suspect this is related to the Android app regression in signalapp/Signal-Android#14451 (which further regressed recently) as both relate to the archive/unarchive function and seem to have been broken recently.

Steps to reproduce

1. Sync with Android device
2. Archive a chat on either device
3. See that it is not archived on the other device

Expected result

Archiving/unarchiving syncs across devices

Actual result

Archiving/unarchiving no longer syncs reliably across devices

Screenshots

No response

Signal version

7.81.0

Operating system

Kubuntu 25.10

Version of Signal on your phone

7.70.1

Link to debug log

No response

Related Issues

• Archiving/unarchiving chats stops syncing between desktop and Android apps Signal-Android#14562

[indutny-signal]

Thank you for the report and sorry for the issue! It sounds like there is at least some difficulty with archival on Android based on the other tickets that you opened, so I'm inclined to say that the fix might also need to happen there.

However, to help us debug this would you be willing to reproduce the issue and provide debug logs from both Android and Desktop? That'd help us a lot!

[Rumperuu]

However, to help us debug this would you be willing to reproduce the issue and provide debug logs from both Android and Desktop? That'd help us a lot!

After I posted the issues it started working again, and I hadn't been able to replicate the issue. But I've captured it now.

In this pic, you can see that the order of chats (colour-coded to match across devices) is different between the apps. Also, chats that have received unread messages after being marked as 'Archived' are correctly unarchived in the Android app, but remain archived (with their notifications) in the desktop app (I have 'Keep muted chats archives' disabled on both devices):

This video shows syncing in both directions (which only works Android-to-desktop; in the second part of the video I am archiving the second chat shown on the mobile app):

untitled.mp4

Here are my debug logs during the above demos:

• Desktop app debug log
• Android app debug log

---

About a week ago I tried to create a group via the desktop app, but when I clicked the 'Create' button it just span forever. I then created the group via the mobile app, but it didn't appear in the desktop app. I sent a message to it, and it appeared in the desktop app as 'Unknown group', and wouldn't receive notifications. I tried unlinking and relinking my device but it made no difference. Eventually, I'm not sure how long later, it started to work.

I'm not sure if this might be the cause or (more likely) another symptom of the same underlying issue with syncing.

[Rumperuu]

signalapp/Signal-Android#14451 is now resolved, but this issue persists (as of Android app version 7.72.2 and desktop app version 7.81.0)

[yash-signal]

Hi @Rumperuu , can you check if the issue persists in the latest version of Signal Desktop, v7.88.0?

[Rumperuu]

Hi @Rumperuu , can you check if the issue persists in the latest version of Signal Desktop, v7.88.0?

Ah, for some reason I was getting a 404 when following the Linux settings on the site:

❯ wget -O signal-desktop.sources https://updates.signal.org/static/desktop/apt/signal-desktop.sources\;
--2026-02-09 19:09:32--  https://updates.signal.org/static/desktop/apt/signal-desktop.sources;
Resolving updates.signal.org (updates.signal.org)... 2606:4700::6812:2a6, 2606:4700::6812:3a6, 104.18.3.166, ...
Connecting to updates.signal.org (updates.signal.org)|2606:4700::6812:2a6|:443... failed: Connection refused.
Connecting to updates.signal.org (updates.signal.org)|2606:4700::6812:3a6|:443... failed: Connection refused.
Connecting to updates.signal.org (updates.signal.org)|104.18.3.166|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2026-02-09 19:09:35 ERROR 404: Not Found.
~ took 2s 

I accessed signal-desktop.sources in my browser and copied the content into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-desktop.sources, and now the update is appearing. I'll try it out and report back if the issue is resolved.

[Rumperuu]

Seems to be fixed now; I'll reopen this if that changes!