See, it turns out that the Rabbit R1 seems to run Android under the hood and the entire interface users interact with is powered by a single Android app. A tipster shared the Rabbit R1’s launcher APK with us, and with a bit of tinkering, we managed to install it on an Android phone, specifically a Pixel 6a.
It needs to be separate hardware because Google and Apple have a strangle hold on their respective OSes. No way in hell Apple/Google would give a random app deep integration with AI. Although not currently present, it seems like Rabbit (and Humane) want to give a ton of control over the system, data, and apps to the AI.
One amendment, I’d say it’s because existing phones won’t let an app have access to listening for a wake word or phrase, and a phone hard codes that to the phone vendor code. Having passive access to microphone and camera and activating and showing what they want to the screen without contending with a platform lock screen that won’t play ball with them, that sort of thing. “AI” access wasn’t really going to be the challenge.
It’s not that they didn’t run on existing phones, I could see that, I find it more stupid that they stopped short of just making their device a phone capable of traditional interaction. As it stands it’s going to be a subset of capability of phones coming out this year that will likely offer similar “AI” features while also continuing to support traditional hand held usage. If they didn’t want to sign up for all that, they probably could have teamed up with someone like Motorola, who might be hungry enough to let Rabbit do their thing on a Moto G variant or something.
All of the apps on the rabbit run in the cloud anyway, as well as the AI bits. Nothing is running locally on the device. There’s nothing the rabbit device does that couldn’t be done via an app or web portal to those cloud services instead.
At least with the Humane AI Pin it was an attempt to create a new class of device. The rabbit r1 however is effectively just an oddly shaped Android phone locked to running a single app. The only reason it seems to exist is to allow an existing hardware company to jump on the AI bandwagon.
there’s nothing the rabbit device does that couldn’t be done via an app
Currently, the Rabbit does 2 things for me that can’t be an app on my phone.
It’s not my phone. I value this enough to pay for it. I spend more time than I would like on my phone. I’m happy when I can use another single purpose device to help me stay focused.
The push to talk hardware button has been more pleasant for me to use than the ChatGPT shortcut on my Pixel phone.
In the end, the ChatGPT + Perplexity in a box fills a space in my life that I can’t find anywhere else—given my criteria.
I understand your criteria is different and you value different things. That’s ok. It just means this device isn’t for you.
What would prevent an Android app from having “deep integration with AI”? If the AI is in the cloud then it’s all done through normal web requests, which don’t even require a permission, let alone so special allowance from Google.
Even now they’re already leveraging their OS-level control. The Android Authority guys said in their report, “the Rabbit R1’s launcher app is intended to be preinstalled in the firmware and be granted several privileged, system-level permissions — only some of which we were able to grant”. I don’t work at Rabbit, so I don’t know exactly what modifications they’ve done to their AOSP fork, but they’re doing something.
If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve messed with the power management of AOSP and probably the process scheduling somehow? I say this because the Rabbit R1 is hands down the fastest way to access an assistant that I’ve used. I have a ChatGPT shortcut on my homescreen of my Pixel 8 phone and the ChatGPT app is constantly killed in the background, so often times I go to access the assistant but I have to wait for an app to load. The R1 is instant.
And that’s without counting the time it takes to face or fingerprint unlock the phone, then tap an icon.
No, I would have not paid $200 if Rabbit was an app. I have ChatGPT and Perplexity on my phone, I don’t like the experience compared to the R1. I paid $200 for the end to end Rabbit experience.
Btw, I get that some people don’t mind unlocking their phone, tapping an icon, waiting for it to load, asking a question, then getting an answer. That’s fine. If you’re happy with that experience, then the Rabbit R1 is not for you.
You brought up advantages of it being a device, which I don’t disagree with. Nothing you said explained the “allow deep integration with AI”. That’s the only part I was questioning.
“rabbit r1 is not an Android app. We are aware there are some unofficial rabbit OS app/website emulators out there. We understand the passion that people have to get a taste of our AI and LAM instead of waiting for their r1 to arrive. That being said, to clear any misunderstanding and set the record straight, rabbit OS and LAM run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications, therefore a local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints won’t be able to access our service. rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third-party clients. Using a bootlegged APK or webclient carries significant risks; malicious actors are known to publish bootlegged apps that steal your data. For this reason, we recommend that users avoid these bootlegged rabbit OS apps.”
So there’s literally no reason for this to have been a device at all.
Except that some people may like this form factor for these features. Of course it can be delivered in phones, but it does seem at least possible to me that some may prefer a device like this.
They’re possibly complimentary but not mutually exclusive. I think if they sold the form factor of the device over the phone that that would have been more honest marketing.
I love the dumb little form factors those guys do. The only thing stopping me is that I know it is overhyped bullshit which I will be bored of in a week. If it were easy to develop my own software to completely replace what’s on it I might be convinced.
You’d be surprised how many companies ignore GPL. Providing broken links to the source code tarballs, telling you to send an email request to get the code then proceed to ignore the requests, etc. Only the most famous case got sued, the rest simply got away with it.
There was a case this year, where SFC, a nonprofit organization won against Vizio for LGPL violation. It’s important, because SFC was just a normal consumer, not the owner of the original code. So now just a random user can sue this Rabbit company, and they should win, more details here: blog.lukaspanni.de/…/the-significance-of-the-vizi…
And there are other funny solutions, like when a Chinese “tech influencer/diy maker” Naomi Wu aka SexyCyborg just simply walked into the office of a Chinese manufacturer, and requested the source code in person: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ
They wrote “lower level firmware modifications”, AOSP runs on Linux kernel, and firmware modifications usually mean they modified the Linux kernel. This device seems like a regular Android phone, and afaik this rules apply to all Android phones, that’s why Android rom cooking can exist.
They may be compelled to release any driver code associated, however firmware is not covered by relation to kernel. Linux runs on mostly proprietary firmware. The “linux-firmware” package in many distributions that contains hot plug firmware is mostly proprietary blobs.
That said I doubt they had much significant firmware work, it may just be logo and some tweaked configuration from their SoC vendor. They likely had to modify AOSP a bit more to allow their launcher unfettered access to the device in ways not modeled by standard AOSP, but that’s user space that isn’t GPL.
This was a marketing post, not a technical one. Unless we see any git branches or ROM teardown we won’t know what they were doing. I highly doubt that they did any kernel patches though.
It’ll be cool when the concept of “Large Action Model” works well. But def not worth it to tie your money to a single horse this early; a lot of people want that concept to work well, so I’m sure there’s a lot of work being done in that area. Rn I agree that it’s just a worse ChatGPT.
Challenge accepted. I’m going to get an IPhone, load up an Android cloud emulator, upload the Rabbit R1 app, then use it to access its orange version of ChatGPT.
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