Bug: phone identity recovery immediately reports expired or lost connection on Desktop 0.5.6
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 32.7k
- Forks
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- Avg merge
- 1d 13h
- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
## Summary
On a fresh Buzz Desktop 0.5.6 identity-recovery screen, **Recover from your phone** immediately opens an expired/disconnected state instead of generating the recovery QR/code. **Try again** does not recover the session.
## Environment
- Buzz Desktop: 0.5.6 (`desktop-v0.5.6`)
- macOS: 26.6
- Architecture: Apple Silicon
- Installation: signed release app in `/Applications`
- Existing signed-in Buzz phone is available
## Reproduction
1. Launch Buzz Desktop without a usable local identity.
2. Select **Use an existing key**.
3. Select **recover from your phone**.
4. Observe the recovery modal.
5. Select **Try again**.
6. Fully quit and relaunch Buzz, then repeat steps 2–3.
## Actual behavior
The recovery modal immediately displays:
> This pairing code expired or lost its connection. Create a new code and try again.
No QR code or copyable pairing code is displayed. **Try again** leaves the modal in the same error state. A full application restart reproduces the failure from a clean welcome screen.
During reproduction, the desktop process showed no established outbound TCP connection for the recovery session—only its localhost listener.
## Expected behavior
Desktop should generate and display a fresh recovery QR/code, allowing the signed-in phone to use **Settings → Send identity to desktop**, followed by SAS confirmation and durable identity import.
## Impact
The new 0.5.6 phone-recovery path is unusable in this environment. A user whose encrypted backup password is unavailable cannot recover the existing desktop identity, leaving creation of a separate replacement identity as the only immediate workaround.
## Safety notes
- No replacement identity was completed during testing.
- The existing phone identity and community remain intact.
- No private key, encrypted backup content, pairing code, or credential is included in this report.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start with the Buzz Desktop 0.5.6 phone-recovery flow and trace how the recovery session creates its connection and pairing code. Reproduce the clean-launch sequence, then verify that a fresh QR/code appears, Try again creates a usable session, and phone recovery reaches SAS confirmation and durable identity import.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- desktop, security
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 64/100