Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL; DR
- The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered wearable gadget that appears to run Android under the hood.
- Many reviewers have criticized the usefulness of AI gadgets like the Rabbit R1, noting that they do little to replace the smartphone and should instead just be an app.
- In fact, the R1's entire user interface appears to be handled by a single Android app.
Update: May 1, 2024 (1:01 AM ET): Rabbit has contacted us Android Authority with a statement from founder and CEO, Jesse Lyu. The statement states that the R1's interface is not an app. The company explains that the LLM it uses runs in the cloud, something we never doubted. We will follow up soon with another article delving deeper into the subject. Until then, you can read Rabbit's full statement below.
“rabbit r1 is not an Android app. We are aware that there are some unofficial Rabbit OS app/website emulators out there. We understand the passion people have to sample our AI and LAM instead of waiting for their R1 to arrive. That said, to clear up any misunderstanding and set the record straight: Rabbit OS and LAM run in the cloud with highly customized AOSP and lower-level firmware tweaks. Therefore, a local bootleg APK without the appropriate OS and cloud endpoints will not be able to access our service. Rabbit OS is customized for r1 and we do not support third party clients. Using a pirated APK or web client carries significant risks; Malicious actors are known to publish pirated apps that steal your data. For this reason, we recommend that users avoid these pirated Rabbit OS apps.”
Original article: April 30, 2024 (5:07 PM ET): When startups like Humane and Rabbit first unveiled their AI-powered gadgets a few months ago, early backers hoped that these AI companions would usher in a new era of wearable AI. Unfortunately for them, both products launched half-baked, leaving tech reviewers with no choice but to sharply criticize them.
The Rabbit R1for example, does virtually nothing different than your Android phone can not. During our hands-on experience, we noticed that the gadget allows you to do things like talk to a large language model (LLM) to get answers to questions, take a photo of an object to get information about it, play music from Spotify, take a drive from Uber, or order food from Doordash, but that's basically it. If everything an AI gadget like the Rabbit R1 can do can be replicated by an Android app, why don't these companies just release an app instead of hardware that costs hundreds of dollars and requires a separate mobile data plan? is to be useful, and has terrible battery life? It turns out that's exactly what Rabbit did…pretty much.
Lo and behold, it turns out that the Rabbit R1 appears to be running Android under the hood, and the entire interface that users interact with is powered by a single Android app. A tipster shared the Rabbit R1 launcher APK with us, and with a little tinkering we managed to install it on an Android phone, specifically a Pixel 6a.
Once installed, we were able to set up our Android phone as if it were a Rabbit R1. The volume up key on our phone corresponds to the Rabbit R1's hardware key, allowing us to go through the setup wizard, create a “rabbithole” account and talk to the AI assistant. Because the Rabbit R1 has a significantly smaller screen with a lower resolution than the Pixel 6a, the home screen interface only took up a small portion of the phone's screen. Still, we were able to ask a question to the AI assistant as if we were using real Rabbit R1 hardware, as you can see in the video below.
We didn't bother testing out other features like Spotify integration, Vision, etc., but we wouldn't be surprised if some of them didn't work. After all, Rabbit R1's launcher app is intended to be pre-installed in the firmware and given several privileged system-level permissions – only some of which we were able to grant – so some features would likely fail if we tried. Still, the fact that this app works on my phone at all is hilarious and a testament to the fact that many of these niche hardware products, at their core, run on a modified version of AOSP.