OpenClaw's native chat apps caught up with one of the Control UI's more advanced conversation controls today: transcript branch switching. Two merged PRs, #112056 for macOS and iOS and #112284 for Android, bring branch menus, rewind and fork behavior, and branch-aware durable outboxes to the native surfaces.
This is the kind of feature that matters most after a long session gets complicated. If a user rewinds a conversation, forks from a message, or switches between transcript branches, the app needs to keep pending sends aligned with the branch the user actually intended.
Before these patches, the web Control UI had branch-switching lineage, but native apps could not see or switch branches in the same way. Worse, durable outboxes were branch-unaware, so an offline or queued message could replay onto the wrong branch after a rewind, fork, or cross-client switch.
What Changed
On macOS and iOS, the composer now gains a branch menu that lists session branches with message counts and timestamps. It refreshes lazily when opened and switches branches through the sessions.branches.list and sessions.branches.switch protocol methods.
The durable outbox now stamps queued rows with a branch epoch. When a confirmed branch change happens, OpenClaw bumps the epoch and parks stale rows instead of blindly flushing them. Delivery callbacks are attempt-versioned, so callbacks from superseded attempts become no-ops.
Android follows the same contract and adds chat bubble actions for Rewind and Fork. Its Room-backed outbox also carries epoch-scoped branch ownership, local flush checks, branch mutation leases, and revision checks to reject stale transcript-tip writes.
Why It Matters
Native chat apps have harder delivery conditions than a single live browser tab. Phones go offline. Apps restart. Multiple windows can share cached state. A message can be queued, delayed, retried, or delivered after a session mutation.
Branch-aware delivery coordination prevents confusing outcomes where a reply intended for one branch lands somewhere else. The PRs add guardrails around several risky moments:
- Switching, rewinding, and forking are gated while runs, sends, aborts, or pending outbox work are active.
- Stale branch-mutation leases demote to a reconciliation state rather than allowing unsafe sends.
- Parked rows that may already have reached the Gateway retry with a fresh delivery identity.
- Remote branch changes feed back into native session state.
The accepted tradeoffs are still honest. The Swift PR notes that a cross-client switch racing a send's arrival can still land on the newly active branch because the protocol does not yet carry an expectedActiveLeaf precondition. The Android PR similarly notes that a fork with unknown outcome can duplicate if the user explicitly retries because the RPC has no idempotency token yet.
Proof From The PRs
The Apple-side PR reports 157 Swift Testing cases across seven suites, covering switch, rewind, fork gating, epoch parking, restart replay validation, cache migrations, connection-generation reconciliation, lease expiry, and stale callback handling.
The Android PR reports 1,820 Android unit tests, clean ktlintCheck, clean Android i18n checks, and adversarial review cycles covering echo correlation, revision CAS, reconcile retry lanes, and ambiguity recovery.
Together, these changes make transcript branching feel less like a web-only power feature and more like a native OpenClaw session primitive.