Why does it matter if it is an android app? Why would they redesign the wheel?
Criticism should be reserved for poor execution and hype over substance.
Criticism should be reserved for poor execution and hype over substance.
The fact that it is already implemented as just an app makes the point all the more valid.
My only guess is that the physical device adds some additional mystique that makes it easier to sell the idea of an "AI in a box" to investors.
I don't see anything but this. Similar to startups hiring just to appear big to investors.
It’s like saying the Light Phone could be an app. They’re trying to do something entirely different, and an app that does what the rabbit does would be very uninteresting.
With the R1, the point is to have an LLM powered AI assistant. Absolutely nothing about the product is enhanced by doing it as a separate device rather than an application. The design is eye catching, but comes at the price of several hundred dollars and requires you to carry two devices around. The second Apple or Google implements this functionality on their phones, this thing is dead. And I guarantee you they are working on this as we speak, and it will be available within 1-2 years natively on iPhones/Android.
A more accurate dig at it is that the main functionality rabbit r1 could be offered just as an app instead of bundled on its own hardware, which is not so true of a car.
Otherwise if they just said it outright I don’t think it would be seen as a criticism.
Usually embedded Android is a trade where you get rich multimedia and heavy UIs made easy at the cost of raw performance compared to something like Qt and a minimalist RTOS.
The Rabbit R1 takes advantage of none of that. The UI is intentionally minimalist, while power draw was supposed to be a concern here. The thing is essentially a dumb client at the end of the day.
For the kind of money they raised they should have been able to do something closer to bare metal and gotten much better performance and battery life.
1. You're going to have way better board/vendor support with Android.
2. The Android networking stack is more featureful than any RTOS. You aren't constrained with e.g. TLS support or paying a vendor $$$$ to implement what the infra team wants.
3. You can hire Android developers by the dozen. RTOS application developers are much more annoying to hire, even if they'll work for cheaper.
4. You don't have to pay a vendor (or build it yourself) to get basic platform functionality like A/B updates, a build system, secure boot, etc. Android has solutions for these of admittedly varying quality.
But you'd also get all of this and more by skipping the hardware entirely and just selling the app.
You can get up to date Linux versions for pretty ancient stuff, but AOSP does zero favors for porting and vendors are more than happy to throw their hands up and leave you fending for yourself, breaking lots of stuff (like the build system) along the way
...but they also raised $30M and landed an extra $10M in their first week of preorders. Between that and the heat behind their name, they weren't hurting for cheap labor.
I think you're ascribing too much intention to their choices, this device feels like they raised a bunch of money, let everyone do their own thing and dumped the result over the wall.
And I wouldn't say that these vendors blanket provide support before EoL. I work on a product where EoL is a very long time due to automotive involvement. The vendor's standard of support is extremely low, with most requests resulting in being pointed to some "partner" which is usually a ragtag team of contractors well versed in some set hacky fixes for the vendor's boards
You choose it because the product demands good performance, low latency, etc. And the Rabbit fits that bill pretty cleanly.
Closer to bare metal doesn't mean it needed to be running a custom GPU driver, but it's also not running a Flutter/Compose app on a 6 year old GPU core...
Regardless, I wouldn't consider those product level features and I also wouldn't consider them strictly limited to RTOSes either. A normal operating system is going to be significantly better for performance on good hardware, which is why all of the top supercomputers are running a variant of Linux. An RTOS may give you lower latency, but it's really specialized to realtime as I'm certain you're aware.
You choose an RTOS because you either have those realtime constraints, you want a "smaller" system, or you're running hardware that can't support a full-fat operating system (e.g. ESP32) and the RTOS offerings are what's most convenient. I don't think any of those apply to the Rabbit device in a realistic way. Implementing it in an RTOS wouldn't speed up the server-side inference that's doing the actual work here, for example. Since there aren't reasons to go with an RTOS, your criteria for OS selection are going to lean towards the meaningful benefits a normal OS like Android offers, both in terms of development tooling and board support.
It all just seems like a bit of a scam for these companies to be saying you need to buy their hardware in order to use their app, only to find out their app doesn’t work after you’ve paid out the money for the hardware.
If rabbit’s pitch was “pay us $200 to trial our app” they’d have had no takers.