This beta release focuses on agent recovery, the introduction of a dedicated iOS Talk tab for realtime voice, and a major migration of cron persistence to SQLite for improved reliability.
The v2026.5.31-beta.2 release brings significant improvements to the stability of agents and the underlying runtime, alongside major feature additions for iOS users and a critical architectural shift in how scheduled tasks are persisted. This update focuses on making the system more resilient to interruptions and expanding the orchestration capabilities of multi-agent environments.
Key Changes
Agent Stability and Recovery
One of the primary focuses of this release is the "cleaner recovery" of agents and CLI-backed runtimes. The system now handles interrupted tool calls, stale session bindings, and media delivery retries more gracefully.
- Terminal Outcome Precedence: A new canonical agent run terminal outcome helper has been implemented. This ensures that hard timeouts and explicit cancellations are no longer overwritten by late aborts or completions, providing a more reliable state projection across the Gateway and SDK (#88136, #88162).
- Session Lock Management: Session lock cleanup has been decoupled from contention reclaim. Live OpenClaw processes now retain their locks during cleanup sweeps, preventing accidental interruptions of active sessions (#88129).
- A2A Messaging Normalization: To fix broken agent-to-agent (A2A) messaging for Anthropic and Pi-backed agents,
sessions_send now normalizes non-canonical body aliases (like SendMessage, content, or text) to the required message property before validation (#88229).
iOS and Mobile Enhancements
Mobile users receive a substantial upgrade in both connectivity and functionality:
- Realtime Talk Tab: A dedicated iOS Talk tab has been added, featuring an animated voice UI and realtime status. To prevent audio loops, playback is now response-scoped, suppressing built-in speaker echo while preserving headset barge-in (#88105).
- Hosted Push Relay: The gateway now defaults to a hosted push relay (
https://ios-push-relay.openclaw.ai) for APNs, simplifying the setup for official and TestFlight builds (#88096).
- WebSocket Reliability: A guard has been added to WebSocket ping continuations to prevent crashes caused by duplicate ping callbacks (#88231).
Infrastructure and Core Refactors
- SQLite Cron Migration: Cron jobs, runtime state, and run history have been moved from legacy JSON/JSONL files into the shared OpenClaw SQLite database. The system automatically imports valid legacy stores and archives them upon successful migration (#88285).
- LLM Core Extraction: Shared LLM contracts, event streams, and tool validation have been extracted into separate
llm-core and llm-runtime packages to improve provider-neutrality and reuse (#88117).
- Code Mode Namespaces: An internal code-mode namespace registry and QuickJS bridge now allow host-owned namespace globals to be exposed inside
exec calls while maintaining strict tool policy and approval hooks (#88043).
New Tools and Orchestration
- Session Goals: Core-owned session goals are now available. Users can use
/goal controls or model tools to create, update, and track goals, with a compact status indicator now visible in the TUI footer (#87469).
- Skill Workshop: A new Skill Workshop guide and agent tool (
skill_workshop) allow for governed skill creation, including a guarded review flow for applying, rejecting, or quarantining proposals.
- Workboard: New orchestration primitives have been added to support multi-agent planning and run tracking (#87469).
Impact
For Developers and Plugin Authors
- SecretRef Integration: A new manifest-level contract for
SecretRef provider integrations allows external secret stores (like Vault or 1Password) to be discoverable and installable as plugins without hardcoding logic into the core (#82326).
- Plugin Delivery: Tokenjuice and the GitHub Copilot agent runtime have been externalized as official plugins (
@openclaw/tokenjuice and @openclaw/copilot).
For End Users
- Control UI Improvements: The Dreaming tab now includes an agent selector, allowing users to switch between different agent contexts to inspect their respective diaries and memories (#78748).
- Media Generation: Generated media completions (image, video, music) are now routed back through the requester agent, allowing the agent to decide the final delivery method rather than forcing a generic message-tool delivery (#88141).
Upgrade Guide
Cron Persistence Migration
Since cron persistence has moved to SQLite, users with existing scheduled jobs will experience an automatic migration on the first run.
- Backup: While the system archives legacy files after a durable import, it is recommended to back up your
~/.openclaw directory before upgrading.
- Quarantine: Malformed legacy stores that cannot be imported will remain on disk in a quarantine state for manual recovery.
iOS Configuration
If you are using a custom push relay URL, ensure your environment overrides are correctly set, as the system now defaults to the official hosted relay.
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