Rabbit R1 can be run on a Android device | Hacker News Reader

Rabbit R1 can be run on a Android device

androidauthority.com

74 pointsmarkuta52 comments

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.

— https://twitter.com/jessechenglyu/status/1745555882291646689

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.

But you do have to submit your signing keys to apple now, iirc :(

You’re thinking of the Google Play Store.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

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.

Pluralizing code or code as a verb is always a red flag.

Seems more likely that its an artifact of being the guy's second language.

Pluralizing code always sounded weird to me, but I think it was more common in certain regions and timeframes.

Code as a verb seems pretty common though.

That's an English-as-a-foreign-language thing. Particularly from Asia.

+1000%

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].

The IAEA still calls them "codes": https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/oncore/SitePages/Home.aspx

[1] unlike the Permissive Action Link code locks on some weapons, which were deliberately set to all zeroes for decades.

As if the issue with the iOS flashlight apps was that their developers did not instead hire teenage engineering to make an android box with a LED

Ask the creators of f.lux

https://justgetflux.com/news/2016/01/14/apple.html

Did Apple steal something from them other than idea?

f.lux isn’t (and wasn’t?) open source and never had an iOS app in AppStore, AFAIK they had a custom Cydia repo for that.

It was possible per side loading

https://justgetflux.com/sideload/

So weird. Especially since Apple will build their LLM based AI assistant regardless of rabbit being in the app store or not.

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?

Their last venture before the R1 was an NFT rug-pull, they're just grifters who moved onto AI after crypto burned out.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1786037498507853852.html

They're determined grifters for sure, bespoke hardware is a much bigger investment than shitting out some NFTs, but they're still probably going to run away and leave you with a useless device in a year.

That goes for half the AI "startups" out there sadly. They know how to get funding and the magic two letters is how.

There's ODMs selling whitelabel versions of these AI wearables now, so expect to see a lot more of this.

https://heytap.tech is https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2024-ODM-OEM-Smart-AI...

So many of them are just API calls to chatGPT.

The reason it's not on the App Store is it would take more effort to fake the number.

>It was very obvious that the original statement from Rabbit was knowingly false when they made it

For people who haven't been following this closely, what was the statement they made?

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.

I think they did, but those can be circumvented easily (i.e. just throw in a couple HTTP headers).

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.

Lies make for really good marketing

The Rabbit is a bad version of the Google app in a plastic case.

If anyone is interested in running "teach mode" directly on their desktop, we're building this over at https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/OpenAdapt.

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.

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.

Yep, but no way to replace the voice activated assistant. Hotword activation requires system permissions.

And if you want to do things like allow the assistant to see what's inside other apps, again not possible without system permissions.

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

Not surprising since it's just an Android app

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)

All this AI slop will be integrated in iOS and Android soon enough, probably with first class integration.

There is only a short, and closing, window of opportunity to grift some money with half baked solutions like this.

I thought the gimmick with this would be that it was the prominent rabbit character talking, but it just sounds like a generic female voice assistant.

How much influence did Teenage Engineering have on this product? Did TE just design the physical aspects only?

Would it be possible to base a device like the R1 on a Raspberry Pi and Linux instead of Android?

If not, what would be missing?

Mobile devs are easier to hire.

This is the real reason

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?

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.

probably worth picking one up when they hit ebay for 20 bucks a pop just for the teenage engineering case design.

The Rabbit R1 is a Juicero remix.

Now the question is: would you want to?

Totally, it's not even a good app

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