It was very obvious that the original statement from Rabbit was knowingly false when they made it. It's weird to me how these companies dig themselves deeper by doing stuff like that, have they never experienced the real world before?
There's ODMs selling whitelabel versions of these AI wearables now, so expect a lot more of this. I forgot the name but I saw an announcement of an AI pin next to the Alibaba listing for that exact hardware, complete with ChatGPT integration ready to go.
It's the statement quoted as a block quote 3/4 of the way down the page on the article:
> 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.
If you read “won’t be able to access” as “forbidden by our TOS to access” that can still be true. Or - literally - at some point in the future they will introduce some preventative measures.
They have. Unfortunately, they took the wrong lesson from the experience, they learned that you can sometimes get away with it and make a quick buck with overt lies, so they'll employ that strategy again with no regrets.
They remixed existing ingredients and delivered an innovative recipe at a compelling price point to the market - and they are being rewarded by innovators for it.
It's different, sure. But it's not _better_ for it. They made the UX worse to give the scroll wheel a reason to exist, that isn't what I class as innovation.
This article isn't a review of the Rabbit R1. It's a response to a statement Rabbit made denying the assertions in an earlier article saying that the Rabbit R1 software was just an android app.
> they are being rewarded by innovators for it.
I don't really understand what you mean. By "innovators" do you mean something like "early adopters"? "Innovators" generally means people who make something new so I don't see how Rabbit, as the company that has launched this product, is being "rewarded by innovators".
> Stop fetishizing the tech for how they got there.
How is this article "fetishizing the tech" by saying that it could have just been an android app?
This has smelt bad for a while. Here’s a Twitter thread from January where the CEO explained why it couldn’t be an app. In it, he makes weird claims like:
> by submitting as app, you submitting all your codes to them. think about it. remember there’s one of the most popular apps you want early days on app store was called ‘flashlight’ now see what happens? apple just incorporated that feature in iOS. so are building apps sustainable to a startup? maybe not.
I think it’s pretty clear that Apple didn’t need to plagiarise some dude’s flashlight app code to build their own version, and you don’t submit your code to Apple/Google anyway.
Love the idea that it was the submission of the flashlight app’s source that enabled Apple to build that feature into the OS. Also love that it completely ignores that the flashlight being part of the OS is significantly better UX than installing an app to do the same thing.
One of my favourite pieces of trivia is that the "nuclear codes" that were so often the subject of some Cold War plot were not necessarily codes as in launch codes, but were/are simulation programs, which were, in aggregate, "codes" (though I'm not 100% clear if a single simulation is a single "code"). Which makes a lot more sense, because simulations would help development, and launch codes would be useless almost immediately as they would change [1].
It wouldn't be too hard. You could even build an electron app to save time and money. The effort would be in making sure that the boot animation appears properly without any debugging text and that the electron app is the first thing that the user sees.
I imagine you’d spend a lot of time replicating stuff Android already does well. Like battery management, cell connection, mobile UI, touch event handling, so on and so forth.
I’d almost be inclined to counter with the opposite: what would be gained by going for just Linux over tailoring Android?
One thing I've been wondering about is, could you build an Android app that acts like google assistant in the sense of you pressing a button/swiping gesture whatever and the "assistant" kicks in from any context on the phone (e.g. while you have another app open)
I'm pretty sure you cannot replace Siri on iOS devices, but I'm not sure about Android. I know there is stuff like Samsung Bixby but I've not used it before.
I guess what I'm saying is, the plastic device seems like kind of a way of making the assistant accessible all the time without you having to open an app (as the app is always 'open' and that's the only app you can use) - but maybe that's possible on Android already idk
> One thing I've been wondering about is, could you build an Android app that acts like google assistant in the sense of you pressing a button/swiping gesture whatever and the "assistant" kicks in from any context on the phone (e.g. while you have another app open)
There is literally an API specifically for this, and the settings app has... an option for choosing which assistant should be invoked when you use the assistant gestures.
Back in the day, you could (ab)use the accessibility api for screen reading. That’s still works, but now there is a proper “read screen contents” permission that the Google Lens app uses and any other app can request
So far thats all it is. But the idea was that they want people to train their "generic app understand and operate" ai, which means they need powers above standard android (super insecure, but they really can not do it as standard android app)
I'm not sure how this is any better/worse than if it actually were a custom OS or whatever. There is no technical reason for this to be a standalone device, just a marketing/corporate one. People are easily tricked by a physical object into thinking it will bring more value than it does, instead of being yet another brightly colored square in the sea of apps. Additionally, this allows them to control their ecosystem outside of the grasp of apple/google (even if it's based on android, they can modify the OS to do whatever and aren't bound by app/play store rules). Anything else they say has always been a front to gain sympathy.
as someone who bought one of these on a whim in the wee hours of the morning, has anyone managed to jailbreak the hardware for any productive purpose yet? seems like an interesting little device even if the rabbit folks are less than forthcoming about the nature of it.
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