Startup Optimization: Gateway restart latency is reduced by overlapping independent startup work. Plugin services now start earlier, and startup logging overlaps with sidecar initialization, while still preserving the critical readiness contract for ACPX probes.
Model Listing Speed: The openclaw models command is now significantly faster (up to 70% reduction in wall time) by reusing a plugin metadata snapshot across the model catalog, provider catalog, and auth index, drastically reducing filesystem openat syscalls.
Restart Diagnostics: New benchmark tooling (pnpm test:restart:gateway) allows for repeatable measurement of restart readiness and downtime. Additionally, ACPX startup probe costs are now explicitly attributed in restart traces for better maintainer visibility.
Update Check Deferral: Gateway readiness no longer blocks on the update-check scheduler, which now runs as a deferred background task.
Android & Voice
Realtime Talk Mode: Android Talk Mode has been migrated from the legacy STT/TTS pipeline to the realtime Gateway relay voice session API. This enables low-latency streaming audio, realtime tool-call bridging, and on-screen transcripts of both the provider and the assistant.
Security Enhancements: Android now prompts users when a Gateway TLS thumbprint changes, displaying both old and new SHA-256 fingerprints to allow for intentional certificate rotations.
Codex & Agent Runtimes
Context Budgeting: To prevent slow WebChat turns in long sessions, the Codex app-server now rotates stale bindings when native rollouts exceed 70k tokens and caps dynamic tool result text before it enters the native thread.
Stability & Recovery:
Subagent Deliveries: Successful keep-mode subagent completions that fail delivery after retries are now suspended rather than terminally cleaned up, preserving the final payload for later recovery.
Task Recovery: Childless Codex-native subagent task mirrors are now treated as recoverable records with a 30-minute grace period before being marked as lost.
Auth Fallback: Hardened recovery for Codex OAuth profiles; refresh_token_reused errors now clear only the specific stale lastGood pointer, allowing a healthy fallback profile to be used.
Tool Policy Enforcement: Codex app-server now strictly honors deny: ["*"] policies, disabling native code mode, built-in environments, and user MCP projection for restricted runs.
Channel Integrations
Telegram:
Reliability: Fixed a critical issue where config hot-reloads could wedge isolated polling ingress workers due to non-zero exit codes on graceful stops.
Media Handling: Telegram albums with failed photo downloads now trigger a user-visible warning instead of silently dropping images.
Context Preservation: Bot reply-chain context is now preserved, ensuring that when a user replies to a bot's media response, the original bot text and media metadata are included in the LLM input.
Privacy: Verbose raw-update logging now redacts sensitive user and chat identifiers to prevent private data leaks into gateway logs.
WhatsApp: The forceDocument flag is now honored end-to-end, allowing agents to send images/GIFs as uncompressed documents.
Discord: Fixed an issue where progress-mode streaming could suppress final replies by incorrectly treating partial previews as proof of delivery.
CLI & Developer Experience
UX Improvements: Added openclaw sessions list as an alias for openclaw sessions to match the convention of other list-style commands.
Diagnostic Clarity: Lane wait warnings now include activeAhead, activeNow, and queueBehind metrics, clarifying whether a command is waiting behind an active task or a queued one.
PowerShell Support: Onboarding for shell completion now resolves and displays the concrete PowerShell profile path and a runnable reload command.
Impact
Fixed Issues
#83008: Telegram ingress worker exit code 1 wedging channels during hot reload.
#83272: Telegram isolated ingress drain hanging after offset advances.
#83231: Empty Claude CLI responses misclassified as billing cooldowns.
#83159: Telegram delivery-mirror entries replacing real assistant replies.
Gateway Startup: Users will notice faster restart times and a more streamlined readiness process.
Android Voice: Talk Mode users will experience a shift to streaming audio and the addition of real-time transcripts.
Telegram Users: Will see explicit warnings when album images fail to download and will experience more reliable bot behavior during configuration changes.
Admin RPC: Trusted admin HTTP RPC clients can now initiate and wait for web QR login flows.
Upgrade Guide
Breaking Changes & Migration
Trusted Proxy Auth: This release revisits the policy from #78684. Same-host internal callers can now use gateway.auth.password as a local direct fallback. Operators who require strict proxy-only authentication for all callers (including local ones) should avoid configuring gateway.auth.password and ensure direct Gateway access is firewalled.