OpenClaw 2026.4.1-beta.1: Native /tasks Board, Plugin SDK Cleanup, and Android Assistant Integration

OpenClaw’s April beta is out — 2026.4.1-beta.1 — and it’s one of the more substantial pre-releases in recent memory, touching everything from session task management to Android integration and exec security defaults.

/tasks: Session-Local Background Task Board

The headline feature is the addition of /tasks as a chat-native background task board tied to the current session. From the release notes:

“add /tasks as a chat-native background task board for the current session, with recent task details and agent-local fallback counts when no linked tasks are visible.”

This is a quality-of-life upgrade for anyone running OpenClaw in long-lived sessions — it gives both the agent and the user a shared view of what’s running in the background without needing to dig into separate tooling.

Plugin SDK: Legacy Paths Deprecated

Two significant plugin migrations landed in this release:

  • xAI/x_search: settings move from core tools.web.x_search.* to plugins.entries.xai.config.xSearch.*. Auth standardizes on plugins.entries.xai.config.webSearch.apiKey / XAI_API_KEY
  • Firecrawl/web_fetch: config moves from core tools.web.fetch.firecrawl.* to plugins.entries.firecrawl.config.webFetch.*, with fallback routing now going through the new fetch-provider boundary

Both migrations include auto-fix support via openclaw doctor --fix, and the legacy compat subpaths will be removed in a future major release.

Task Flow: Managed Child Spawning and Sticky Cancel

The Task Flow system gets two notable improvements:

  • Managed child task spawning with sticky cancel intent — external orchestrators can stop scheduling immediately and let parent flows settle to cancelled once active children finish
  • A bound api.runtime.taskFlow seam lets plugins create and drive managed Task Flows from host-resolved OpenClaw context without passing owner identifiers on each call

Exec Defaults: YOLO Mode by Default

A notable behavioral change: gateway/node host exec now defaults to security=full with ask=off — meaning it requests YOLO mode by default and skips the approval prompt. The release notes frame this as aligning host approval-file fallbacks and docs/doctor reporting with the no-prompt default.

Android: Google Assistant App Actions

The Android app adds assistant-role entrypoints and Google Assistant App Actions metadata, enabling OpenClaw to be launched from the Assistant trigger with prompts handed directly into the chat composer.

Other Changes

  • Provider-owned replay hook surfaces for transcript policy, replay cleanup, and reasoning-mode dispatch
  • A before_agent_reply hook lets plugins short-circuit the LLM with synthetic replies after inline actions
  • Feishu gains dedicated Drive comment-event handling
  • Telegram topic routing and Feishu scoped inheritance are preserved across bootstrap, model override, restart, and tool-policy paths

Full changelog at github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases

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