The notification came from your browser. It opens an app.

Something finishes in ChatGPT on the web. A notification appears. You click it — and the Codex desktop app takes focus. Not the tab. Not the conversation. A different program, which now has to load, possibly authenticate, and show you something adjacent to what you asked about.

The tab you actually wanted is still open, somewhere behind everything, exactly where you left it.

A notification is a bookmark

That’s the whole contract. A notification says “something happened over here” — and clicking it is a request to go back to where that was. Not to the vendor. Not to their preferred client. To the place you were.

Here, the return trip goes somewhere you never were. The notification had the information — it was raised by a specific surface, in a specific session — and it discarded that in favour of “open a link for this service, whatever’s registered to handle it.”

Why it happens

The desktop app registers itself as the handler for the service’s URL scheme or universal links. From then on the OS routes every such link to the app, regardless of where it originated. It’s the same mechanism that makes a Slack link open the Slack app instead of the tab you were reading, or a Spotify link jump out of the browser mid-flow.

The routing decision is made by installation, not by context. Installing a desktop client silently re-points every notification and link for that service, permanently, with no per-notification memory of where things actually happened.

The principle

Return traffic should follow origin, not registration. A notification raised by a browser session belongs to that browser session. The service knows which client produced it — it has a session, a device, a surface identifier — and none of that survives the round trip.

The general form: hand-offs should preserve context, not reset it. Any time a system moves you between surfaces it should be taking you closer to what you were doing, and this one moves you sideways into a different application.

The math

500M dual-client users × 12 misroutes/yr × 20s = ~50 lifetimes / year

The seconds undersell it slightly: the cost isn’t only the switch, it’s re-finding the tab and rebuilding what you were thinking about. Interruption is expensive out of proportion to its duration.

The fix

1. Stamp notifications with their origin surface and route back to it. If it came from a browser session, open the browser.
2. Ask once when the desktop client registers as handler — “Open links in the app?” — rather than claiming them silently at install time.
3. Fall back to last-used, not to whatever was installed most recently.

Difficulty to fix: easy

The notification knew where it came from. Something between there and your click decided that didn’t matter. Carry the origin, and send people back to the place they actually were.