Getting started

Your apps. Your data. Your devices.

Centraid turns your OpenClaw into a personal app store. Tiny, single-purpose apps that live on your own server and show up on your devices.

OpenClaw is messaging-first — you talk to it from WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, wherever you already chat. That's perfect for one-line jobs: "log my weight", "what's on my calendar?", "remind me at 7pm".

Some things don't fit in a sentence. You want to see them — a month of expenses, your habit grid, last week's runs on a map, the photos from the trip. For those, a glance beats a paragraph and tapping beats typing.

Centraid is the rich-UI layer for those. Same OpenClaw underneath — your connections, your agents, your data — with a screen wrapped around the apps that need one.

Two AI helpers come built in:

• One uses your apps for you — ask in plain language, it works the buttons.
• One makes apps just for you — describe a new app or a change to an existing one, and it ships it. No code needed.

Under the hood, both helpers use the same buttons you do — so anything you can do in the UI, the AI can do too, and the other way around. The rest of this page is the developer setup; if you just want to try it, start at the Quickstart.

Centraid ships as a monorepo. The desktop app embeds a local gateway out of the box — no separate server to run. The same gateway code can also be mounted on an OpenClaw instance to host apps remotely; the two modes share one upload-and-version-flip contract.

Prerequisites

• Bun >= 1.3.x — install from bun.sh. Centraid pins bun@1.3.13 in package.json#packageManager.
• Node >= 24 (recommended) for built-in node:sqlite. Node 22.5 – 23.x works behind --experimental-sqlite.
• macOS, Linux, or Windows for the desktop shell.
• Xcode (iOS) or Android Studio (Android) only if you plan to build the mobile companion to a device.

Install

git clone https://github.com/srikanthsrungarapu/centraid.gitcd centraidbun install

Run the desktop app

bun run dev:desktop

This invokes turbo run dev --filter=@centraid/desktop. The Electron shell launches with the local gateway embedded in the main process; the renderer connects to it over IPC. App iframes load from the in-process gateway at /centraid/<id>/.

Run the mobile companion

bun run dev:mobile

Starts the Expo dev server. The mobile app talks to a Centraid gateway over HTTP — it does not embed one of its own.

TODO(#120) — confirm whether mobile defaults to a paired desktop's gateway or requires a remote gateway URL, and document the pairing flow. The steering ledger references mobile work but I haven't read the pairing code.

Build and check

bun run build        # turbo run build (all apps + packages)bun run typecheck    # TypeScript across the workspacebun run check        # oxfmt --check + oxlintbun run ci           # what CI runs: check + typecheck

What's running where

flowchart LR
  subgraph Desktop["Electron desktop"]
    Renderer["Renderer (vanilla TS)"]
    Main["Main process"]
    Local["Embedded local gateway"]
    Main --- Local
    Renderer -- "IPC" --> Main
  end
  subgraph Remote["OpenClaw host (optional)"]
    OC["OpenClaw gateway"]
    Plugin["@centraid/openclaw-plugin"]
    OC --- Plugin
  end
  Mobile["Mobile (Expo)"]
  Mobile -- "HTTPS" --> Remote
  Mobile -. "or local LAN" .-> Local

Both gateways speak the same /centraid/_apps/*, /centraid/_tool/*, and /centraid/<id>/* surfaces. See Architecture for the full breakdown.

Next steps