Rabbit R1, a thing that should just be an app, actually is just an Android app
When startups like Humane and Rabbit first unveiled their AI-powered gadgets a couple of months ago, early backers were hopeful 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 harshly criticize them.
The Rabbit R1, for example, does almost nothing that your Android phone can’t do. In our hands-on, we noted that the gadget lets you do things like talk to a large language model (LLM) to get answers to questions, take a photo of an object to get info about it, play music from Spotify, hail a ride 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, then why aren’t these companies simply releasing an app instead of hardware that costs hundreds of dollars, requires a separate mobile data plan to be useful, and has terrible battery life? It turns out that’s exactly what Rabbit has done…sort of.
See, it turns out that the Rabbit R1 seems to run Android under the hood and the entire interface users interact with is powered by a single Android app. A tipster shared the Rabbit R1’s launcher APK with us, and with a bit of tinkering, we managed to install it on an Android phone, specifically a Pixel 6a.
