[macOS Desktop] Project/Section Home is hard or impossible to open; project session lists do not update by recency

What version of the app are you using?

ChatGPT Desktop 26.908.40834 on macOS (Apple Silicon / arm64).

Subscription

ChatGPT Plus.

What issue are you seeing?

The unified macOS ChatGPT desktop app makes ChatGPT Projects substantially harder to use than the web UI.

There are two related navigation problems:

1. Project / Section Home is not reliably accessible. In the Projects area, selecting a pinned Project/Section primarily exposes its session/chat dropdown rather than giving me a clear, reliable way to open the Project/Section Home / overview. The home/overview is important because that is where the project itself should be managed and understood as a workspace, rather than just as a container of old chats.

2. The sessions shown under a Project do not update/sort according to recency. Chats I have used recently are not reliably promoted to the top of the Project dropdown. The ordering appears stale or otherwise unrelated to latest activity.

Together these make pinning Projects much less useful: the Project is pinned, but the thing I actually need to resume — the most recently active session — is not surfaced predictably, and opening the Project's home/overview is cumbersome or unavailable.

This is especially confusing because the desktop app's global Recents view supports sorting/filtering/pinning, while the per-Project session list does not behave like a useful recency-based navigation surface.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open ChatGPT Desktop on macOS.
2. Go to the ChatGPT surface and locate a Project in the sidebar.
3. Pin/use the Project and create or continue several chats/sessions inside it over time.
4. Return to the Project in the sidebar.
5. Observe that:
   • there is no obvious/reliable route to the Project/Section Home / overview from the Project entry; and
   • the sessions in the Project dropdown are not ordered/refreshed by latest activity, so a recently used session can remain buried below older ones.

Expected behavior

• Clicking a Project name, or a clearly exposed Project Home / Section Home action, should always open the Project overview/home.
• Expanding a Project should be a separate action from opening the Project home.
• Sessions/chats inside a Project should default to Latest Updated ordering, or at minimum provide a persistent sort control.
• When a chat inside a Project is used, its position in the Project's session list should update immediately or after sync.
• Pinning a Project should make it an effective shortcut to both the workspace itself and its most recent work.

Actual impact

This turns pinned Projects into poor navigation shortcuts. With a non-recency-sorted session dropdown, I still have to hunt for the conversation I was just using, which defeats much of the point of pinning the Project. The missing/obscure Project Home path also makes the desktop app materially less usable than the web experience for project-based workflows.

Related reports / context

There have already been reports about Project Home navigation regressions in the desktop app and about project/sidebar state inconsistencies. This report is specifically about the current macOS desktop navigation UX plus stale/non-recency ordering of sessions inside Projects.

No private Project names, chat contents, or account identifiers are included.

Start by reproducing the issue in ChatGPT Desktop on macOS through the Projects sidebar, using several chats and revisiting them over time. Verify that selecting a Project exposes a reliable Project Home path and that its sessions refresh into latest-updated order; the issue provides no file or test names, so the relevant entry point must be located first.