On iPhone, a long ChatGPT Chat turn can apparently stop or be lost when the app is sent to the background. This is especially problematic for long reasoning/research turns that may have already consumed substantial time and compute.
Work already has the infrastructure to continue longer tasks in the cloud independently of whether the mobile app remains in the foreground.
I would like ChatGPT to automatically preserve an active Chat turn when iOS backgrounds the app. Ideally:
- If a Chat response can continue normally server-side, simply keep it running.
- If ordinary Chat cannot continue because the client connection/background execution is interrupted, automatically hand the active turn over to Work/cloud execution instead of cancelling it.
- Preserve the full conversation context and selected model/reasoning settings as closely as possible.
- When I reopen ChatGPT, show that the turn continued in the background and return the completed result in the same conversation.
- If moving the task to Work has implications for usage limits, tools, privacy, or model behavior, ask once for permission to enable automatic handover, with a setting such as “Continue unfinished Chat turns with Work when app is backgrounded.”
At minimum, ChatGPT should persist the server-side generation rather than silently losing the turn when the iPhone app is suspended.
Use case: I start a difficult or long-running Chat query, switch briefly to another iPhone app, and return later. I should not have to keep ChatGPT visible purely to prevent the generation from being aborted.
This would make Chat and Work complement each other: Chat remains the normal interactive interface, while Work transparently provides resilient background execution when necessary.