- Rabbit R1, AI gadget, runs on Android app, not requiring “very bespoke AOSP” firmware as claimed by Rabbit.
- Rabbit R1 launcher app can run on existing Android phones, not needing system-level permissions for core functionality.
- Rabbit R1 firmware analysis shows minimal modifications to standard AOSP, contradicting claims of custom hardware necessity by Rabbit.
I don’t really care for this product. It’s another unnecessary AI assistant. What I’m struggling to understand is why it matters which platform it’s been built on. What difference would it make if they wrote an entire OS from scratch only for this device instead of using Android, if the end product would be the same?
Because the main criticism of this class of products is “why in the fuck would I need a device for this? my phone already has a data plan, a microphone, and a camera. Make it an app” and the response is some vague “oh well it’s so advanced (it’s not.) it couldn’t possibly run on a phone”.
The vision is that once TPUs become affordable enough to run these models on-device, you would need a device that has such a TPU and you would go to them. But this is completely overlooking the fact that all snapdragons and the like would also have the same TPUs integrated, and also we’re not there yet, so for as long as you need to send the query to openAI’s API, why is this not an app?
If the product was as they marketed and sold it, it shouldn’t be able to run on Android.
Clearly they lied to their customers, I’d be pissed.