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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2292 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Why would deleting the program itself also nuke all of your chat history. That does not make any sense. No other app behaves this way.

You should not use any mobile device then. Deleting all data associated with an app is standard procedure on phones.

Deleting the Claude app from my phone presumably doesn't also delete all my chats. Permanently. I think it's fair to assume that the desktop version of the app (which, by the way, is literally named the exact same thing) would also save my chat history to the cloud (or maybe to a separate local directory). This is, in fact, what already happens if you use either Chat or Cowork. Claude Code is just one tab away from these, but works completely differently. And this difference is not communicated well enough. Now, when uninstalling, it should, at the very least, give me a warning or something that I'm about to lose all my chat history in Claude Code.

Deleting the Claude app from my phone presumably doesn't also delete all my chats.

Did you check if this is true? Use a different phone if you can, or back up all your chats first before testing.

It's a known issue apparently:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/62997

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/81907

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/85209

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/29373

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/27349

It's surprising how bad every single coding agent software package is. OpenCode's GUI tool goes the exact opposite direction: it has no way to remove a project from history, up to and including completely uninstalling the tool and deleting its AppData and .local files. Not even a code-level bad decision, someone put effort into making it happen, and I want to club them with a baseball bat.

The CLIs are better, but that just makes it more confusing.

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