v0.14 is the biggest pre-1.0 release we've shipped. Two big things, and a handful of smaller ones.
Stratus · Vision (Beta)
Stratus is now available as a beta module. Open the camera, point it at text, get a structured reading — title, body, any tables, any equations. Stratus runs Apple's VNRecognizeTextRequest as its OCR front-end, then routes the recognized text to a small vision-language model for interpretation. It handles:
- Signs and menus in most Latin-alphabet languages.
- Receipts, including line-item extraction and total parsing.
- Whiteboards and printed pages (best over 720p capture).
- Mathematical expressions via an optional LaTeX rendering step.
Stratus is labeled beta because we know the vision model catalog is still thin. Expect meaningful accuracy improvements over the next two releases.
Gale picks up vision
You can now attach an image directly in Gale. If your chosen chat model supports vision (Gemma 3 Vision, Phi-3.5 Vision, Qwen 2.5 VL), the image is routed natively. If it doesn't, the image is handed to Stratus first, and the extracted text is prepended to your prompt. Either way, the capability manifest makes the routing decision for you.
Model catalog updates
- Added: Qwen 2.5 VL 7B (vision), Gemma 3 Vision 4B, Phi-3.5 Vision.
- Promoted: Llama 3.2 3B Instruct is now the default recommendation on all device tiers.
- Deprecated: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct — replaced by Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct, which benchmarks better on A17 Pro.
Smaller things
- Cirrus now supports GitHub Enterprise hosts (BYO base URL).
- Ashe's activity feed gained a per-hand filter.
- Overture no longer blocks the UI during long transcription jobs — they run in the background task queue.
- A memory leak in the chat bubble layout that showed up after ~1,000 messages in a single chat is fixed.
- The theme engine is now centralized; every module reads from the same palette file.
What's next
v0.15 focuses on Mirage (image generation) and finalizing Zephyr for v1. Stratus leaves beta in v0.16. Full v1 is targeted for shipping alongside the App Store submission — we'll post a more detailed roadmap when the App Review dust settles.
Tagged Changelog · Published Feb 21, 2026 · Back to all posts