Quadlet renders --rm, so every stop DELETES the container: a scan during
the stop->start window legitimately sees nothing where an installed app
lives. The state layer treated that as the app not existing — after three
absent scans it removed the entry entirely, so dashboard tiles vanished
mid-restart, gate waits read 'absent' (grafana, at load ~2, ruling out
contention), and under daemon-restart churn the FIRST scan could publish
a completely empty My Apps map (observed twice on 2026-08-09).
Two guards, both keyed to the durable installed-apps.json registry:
- Eviction: an id the registry says is installed, and the user has not
uninstalled, is held as Stopped (health/exit cleared) instead of being
removed. The next scan that sees the container restores live state;
desired-state recovery still recreates genuinely lost containers; a
deliberate uninstall clears the registry first and still disappears.
- Empty scans: the first-scan exemption no longer applies when the
registry is non-empty — better to keep saying "scanning" than "empty".
Verified: scan-merge/absence/registry test filters 34/34.
Also carries the v1.7.127-alpha changelog (user-benefit entries for the
Tor self-heal, trusted invites, the three-layer mempool fix, vanishing
apps, the Bitcoin version pin, and the smaller UI fixes).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>