Guide

OpenClaw v2026.7.1-beta.2: Control UI and native macOS chat, recovery notes

July 5, 20265 min readUpdated September 11, 2026By OpenClawBlog Team

v2026.7.1-beta.2 is easiest to understand through failure. The official record describes a provider, model, voice, or context change; the sections below spell out what to save, what to interrupt, and what must remain available afterward.

This candidate is still pre-release. Treat provider, channel, and migration behavior as unconfirmed until your own bounded test passes. Treat the version as one input to the decision. Local credentials, enabled plugins, channels, and host support still need their own evidence.

Channel
Pre-Release

Primary signals
New models and providers; Control UI and native macOS chat; Conversational onboarding

Publication date
2026-07-05

Failure and recovery path

New models and providers

Evidence from the release. add Featherless, Claude Sonnet 5 and Mythos 5, Meta Muse Spark 1.1, and ClawRouter; make GPT-5.6 the new-setup default with /think ultra for Sol and Terra plus max for Luna, honor Z.AI max, and refresh model availability after OAuth renewal.

Operator reading. Treat New models and providers as a boundary change. Exercise one permitted request and one refused request with a test identity, then keep both decisions in the log.

Control UI and native macOS chat

Evidence from the release. make sessions primary with a minimal searchable sidebar, compact context ring, reasoning-effort slider, cleaner dashboard chrome, and a native macOS session browser with model and thinking pickers, slash commands, transcript export, and context usage.

Operator reading. The safe reading of Control UI and native macOS chat is operational: prove the model can answer the intended task, then force a bounded failure and verify that no side effect is repeated.

Conversational onboarding

Evidence from the release. Crestodian now runs a real agent-loop setup across the CLI, web install, and macOS app, with AI-guided provider setup, model-judged approvals bound to exact operations, masked credential prompts, and deterministic fallback when no model is available.

Operator reading. The useful evidence for Conversational onboarding is the refusal path as well as the success path. Use synthetic credentials and record the policy that made each decision.

Offline and spoken mobile chat

Evidence from the release. iOS and Android now pre-paint bounded per-gateway session and transcript caches offline; Apple Watch gains full voice turns, and iOS can speak replies through configured Gateway TTS with on-device fallback.

Operator reading. Check Offline and spoken mobile chat with a known prompt and a disposable account. Save the selected route, reasoning setting, latency, and refusal or fallback result so another operator can reproduce it.

The limits of the recovery promise

Session organization and generated titles

generate concise session titles through utility-model routing and add Gateway-backed groups, unread state, rename, fork, archive, and delete controls, plus group management across web, iOS, and Android.

Session organization and generated titles lives at the handoff between the Gateway and a conversation. Send one harmless message, reconnect once, and compare the account, thread, sender, and final transcript.

Meta provider

add bundled muse-spark-1.1 Responses API support with streaming, tool calls, encrypted reasoning replay, onboarding, exact-model live validation, and standalone npm/ClawHub distribution as @openclaw/meta-provider.

A catalog label for Meta provider is only the first signal. Confirm the account, endpoint, context limit, and tool policy that the running Gateway actually selected.

Android chat agent selector

switch the active agent directly from the live chat screen while keeping chat, Talk mode, and home canvas on the same canonical session.

For Android chat agent selector, inspect state rather than only the new control. Repeat the flow after reload and reconnect, and note the session, pending action, URL, and visible error.

Run the smallest useful rehearsal

Write down the baseline for New models and providers, including the installed version, host, provider, and workspace.
Confirm what can be restored, then take a verified backup before applying the candidate package.
Use a disposable session to compare the new model or provider with the previous route on one fixed input.
Restore the previous provider setting after the check and retain the measured result beside the release tag.
Keep the experiment bounded; an unexpected result belongs in the release record before any wider rollout.

openclaw --version
openclaw gateway status
openclaw security audit

Leave a usable maintenance note

Save the command, output, source link, and environment used for this check. Future operators should be able to tell whether a difference belongs to the release or to local provider, channel, or platform state.

Fix details to carry forward

Codex runtime switching. accept the bundled Codex runtime for both codex/* and openai/* model routes while keeping unsupported provider/runtime pairs rejected. This is the edge case to include in a regression check, especially when the release is pre-release.

LM Studio and xAI repaired tool calls. emit the terminal tool-call event before completion when promoting serialized plain-text tool calls, preserving the complete streaming lifecycle for consumers. Treat the fix as a boundary condition and retain the source wording beside your local result.

Keep the full v2026.7.1-beta.2 notes with your test result. Read the official release index for neighboring versions and the model provider reference for configuration limits.