PocketClaw started as a real product: a full AI gateway running 24/7 on old Android phones. The first unit was a Moto E2 (XT1524) bought for $20 in 2025 — 1 GB of RAM, Android 6.0, Snapdragon 410. The goal was to host a self-hosted AI agent on the smallest, oldest hardware we could find.
We pulled it off. There are 60+ guides on this site documenting every modification — kernel exploits, V8 heap tuning, native compilation, LD_PRELOAD shims, custom launchers, the works. By March 2026 the phone was running an unmodified OpenClaw gateway with Telegram and Discord bots, on Android 6.
Why the project changed
Three things happened in March-April 2026:
- OpenClaw shipped a 1-click RCE. CVE-2026-25253. About a thousand public installs were popped before the patch landed. Read the full timeline.
- The market saturated. Five managed-OpenClaw services launched in a quarter, all with better marketing budgets than us.
- The honest writing was the actual product. The traffic, the inbound, the warm conversations — they all came from the guides, not the phone.
So we leaned in. PocketClaw is now a publication: in-depth guides, security audits and migration tutorials for self-hosted AI agents. The hardware project is on ice. The writing continues.
What stays
All 60+ original guides are still here under /guides. They're still useful if you're trying to run something heavy on a small device. The links from pocketclaw.dev/hacks/... are 301-redirected to /guides/... — nothing on the old internet should break.
What's next
New writing focuses on the post-OpenClaw landscape: Hermes Agent, Nanobot, NanoClaw, IronClaw, ZeroClaw. Comparisons, audits, migration paths. Subscribe if that's your beat.