It's kind of interesting that everyone is going for the desktop app format now.
These desktop agentic coding tools are a large UX step up from the CLIs, but I still think the future is going to be remote development as the coding agents start running for hours at a time. Building a desktop app seems short-sighted as it would just lock them out of the remote option completely.
Doesn't lock you out at all. Codex already had a companion app for mobile so you can send prompts to your desktop app while you go about your business. The infrastructure is there. Server might move from your desktop to cloud at some point but not much changes. Still needs somewhere to run.
I think their goal is to lock you into their ecosystem instead of using your IDE
But now is now, and what you are talking about is a future that may or may not exist.
The desktop app can become a client for their remote cloud agent solution (yuck).
Codex App can spawn/control Codex agents running in the cloud.
You can get to it wherever you want. Copilot CLI is pretty great: https://github.com/features/copilot/cli
There's support in VS Code and Jetbrains IDEs. You can access your agent sessions on the web.
(I work at GitHub, but not on Copilot)