OpenClaw v2026.2.9 dropped today with a feature list that reads like three releases stapled together. The highlights:
Your Phone Is Now a Node
The headline feature is an alpha iOS node app with setup-code onboarding, paired with new device pairing and phone control plugins. Type /pair in Telegram, scan a code, and your OpenClaw agent can now control your phone — camera, location, notifications, the works.
Android node support has been in testing; iOS catches up with this release. Both platforms share the same pairing flow through the Telegram bot.
Grok Joins the Search Party
xAI's Grok is now available as a web_search provider alongside Brave and Perplexity. Configure it in tools.web.search with an xAI API key. Inline citations are supported.
The Amnesia Fix
The most impactful bug fix: post-compaction amnesia is gone. Previously, when a session hit context limits and compacted, the injected transcript could break the session's parent chain — effectively giving agents selective memory loss. The fix preserves the parentId chain across compaction writes.
If your agent kept "forgetting" things after long conversations, this is why. Update.
What Else Shipped
Channels: BlueBubbles got a comprehensive overhaul. Discord now supports forum and media thread creation.
Stability: Context overflow from oversized tool results is now caught pre-emptively with fallback truncation. HTTP 400 errors trigger model failover instead of hard failures. The cron scheduler got reliability hardening.
Telegram fixes: Quote parsing is hardened against QUOTE_TEXT_INVALID errors, stale topic thread IDs are recovered automatically, and command registration is capped at 100 entries to avoid Telegram's limits.
Developer quality-of-life: OPENCLAW_HOME lets you override the home directory for path resolution. Exec approvals render in monospace for safer scanning. Config now clamps maxTokens to contextWindow automatically.
The Numbers
This release includes contributions from 20+ community members across iOS development, channel integrations, search providers, and core stability. The full changelog is on GitHub.
Update: npm install -g openclaw@latest
OpenClaw is at ~175,000 GitHub stars. The lobster keeps growing.