Rabbit R1 is Just an Android App
Submitted 6 months ago by thequantumcog@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8d910f2b-b8c6-4650-8f2f-6b56b30fe865.png
Comments
ar0177417@lemmy.world 6 months ago
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 6 months ago
Technically you can’t call it “Android” without paying Google for certification and play store/gapps license. It’s AOSP.
cyrus@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Just so you know, AOSP is short for Android Open Source Project.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 6 months ago
Dude, maybe it was meant to be a joke, but that doom picture is so fake. C’mon.
gears@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
ChanchoManco@lemm.ee 6 months ago
His point still stands as the image in the thumbnail of the article is as fake as it gets.
erwan@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Well doom can run on a freaking pregnancy test. At that point if it had any kind of processor and a screen, it can run Doom.
chrash0@lemmy.world 6 months ago
what else would it be? it’s a pretty common embedded target. dev kits from Qualcomm come with Android and use the Android bootloader and debug protocols at the very least.
nobody is out here running a plain Linux kernel and maintaining a UI stack while AOSP exists. would be a foolish waste of time for companies like Rabbit to use anything else imo.
to say it’s “just an Android device” is both true and a mischaracterization. it’s likely got a lot in common with a smartphone, but they’ve made modifications and aren’t supporting app stores or sideloading. doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work 1-1
thequantumcog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You are missing the point. The point is that there is no need for such a device, a simple android app can do everything that rabbit r1 does.
erwan@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Yeah, but everyone could see that as soon as they released it.
It doesn’t matter how it’s implemented, it could have been done as an app from day one.
But they made it a device instead because it makes it easy to raise funds and to get journalists to talk about it. As simple as that.
chrash0@lemmy.world 6 months ago
i didn’t think people would really be surprised. but maybe i’m jaded by my experience in the industry.
if we’re arguing whether or not it’s objectively stupid, i think that’s up to the market to decide.
kinda seems like a toy to me anyway, and it’s kind of priced that way
utopiah@lemmy.world 6 months ago
nobody is out here running a plain Linux kernel and maintaining a UI stack while AOSP exists.
Wrong, that’s even why I bought a PineTab2, PinePhone, and a reMarkable and use them pretty much daily.
Are there a lot of these compared to Android? No, but please do not say “nobody” when you mean “most” or “the vast majority” because by doing so you are reducing the perception of choice. Some people, like me, DO prefer plain Linux when they can. By hiding the fact that commercial solutions do exist this is helping an already dominant solution.
TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 6 months ago
Yep. The video monitor/config menu built into one of my drone's transmitters is an Android device. It literally looks like they straight up stuck a tablet underneath the control sticks.
arc@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I saw the Marquess Brownlee review of this thing last night and I wonder why companies make this crap and who is fool enough to fund it. It’s obviously doomed to fail, as are most “smart” gadgets & devices. The best that can be said for it, is at least there is no subscription to use it and it’s not outrageously expensive but that’s damning it with faint praise.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
VCs will just follow the hype of the day and invest in anything that spouts the right buzzwords. But they’re aware of course, that most of those will fail. It takes just one out of ten to make it for it to be worthwhile.
arc@lemm.ee 6 months ago
If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.
jkrtn@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
This is the second time I’ve read about this specific reviewer having a sane perspective on way overhyped gadgets. Sounds worth checking out. I’m used to videos being completely worthless because they are usually trying to get product affiliate money and YouTube ad revenue at the same time.
RGB3x3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t remember a single occasion where he was sponsored by the company he’s reviewing. He gets sent products all the time, but it seems to always be with the stipulation that if he thinks it sucks, he’ll say so.
drislands@lemmy.world 6 months ago
He’s my go-to for tech reviews. He’ll happily gush about what he likes, but he isn’t shy about what isn’t good.
yamanii@lemmy.world 6 months ago
For a counterpoint, I ask you to see his Cybertruck review, he definitely put his kiddy gloves for it.
yamanii@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s 200 USD contrary to the 700 USD humane pin, I think it’s ok as a niche toy, it’s why Marquess was also much more forgiving of it.
heavy@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I heard about this thing but couldn’t really tell what the idea was. I think I want to carry less, not more on me.
dm_me_your_boobs@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Do you not carry 3 phones already. Just swap one out.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Do you guys not have 3 phones?
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Wait until people realize that it’s just ChatGPT.
Cosmos7349@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’ll be cool when the concept of “Large Action Model” works well. But def not worth it to tie your money to a single horse this early; a lot of people want that concept to work well, so I’m sure there’s a lot of work being done in that area.
jg1i@lemmy.world 6 months ago
We know it’s just ChatGPT (and Perplexity). That’s why we bought it. It’s just a fun frontend for a chat bot. That’s like the main point.
mriormro@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s more just a waste of resources. This thing has no reason to exist.
It’s the ‘this could have been an email’ of consumer devices.
Cosmos7349@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Haha can’t run R1 on an iPhone. Take that Apple. Absolute gamechanger.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Challenge accepted. I’m going to get an IPhone, load up an Android cloud emulator, upload the Rabbit R1 app, then use it to access its orange version of ChatGPT.
Cosmos7349@lemmy.world 6 months ago
gpt4kids. It has a rabbit!
lorkano@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Rabbit is literally paying for processing those Ai requests. If everyone starts to download it to their android devices they will literally go bankrupt
mriormro@lemmy.world 6 months ago
lol
tomjuggler@lemmy.world 6 months ago
As a former Android developer, you can’t just do anything in an android app on a modern smartphone. The system is fighting you for resources the whole time. It makes sense to have something like this running as root on a device that you control.
Not that I’m sold on it, just saying…
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Isn’t that more non standard implementations by OEMs? Because pixel and stock-ish Android devices don’t have such issues afaik.
photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
What’s with the terribly photoshopped doom pic?
thequantumcog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was lazy to find the real picture. So, I just posted the first one I found.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 6 months ago
You do realize that your statements now seem less credible than if you had left that picture out, right?
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Note that this is mostly due to the closed source drivers and nonexistent Linux support for smaller SoCs. Some manufacturers are quite good in that front (e.g. Broadcom/Raspberry Pi, Rockchip), with others you’re lucky if they allow you to use Linux at all, with no GPU drivers (which you often have to pirate the binaries, thanks ARM for making Mali a completely closed source project from its open source origins).
xthexder@l.sw0.com 6 months ago
Note that since it’s just an Android app, there is no purpose in selling this e-waste device other than increasing the price, since it does nothing you can’t already do on your phone.
macaroni1556@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Broadcomm is actually terrible, the Rpi foundation just had an in.
NXP deserves some credit for good board support packages and documentation.
thequantumcog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Broadcom is also closed source (I think). I have to use closed source drivers for my broadcom wireless adapter on Linux.
vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
Watched a review of this thing. Don’t see the appeal. Especially don’t see why it needs to be a separate bit of hardware.
jg1i@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It needs to be separate hardware because Google and Apple have a strangle hold on their respective OSes. No way in hell Apple/Google would give a random app deep integration with AI. Although not currently present, it seems like Rabbit (and Humane) want to give a ton of control over the system, data, and apps to the AI.
thehatfox@lemmy.world 6 months ago
All of the apps on the rabbit run in the cloud anyway, as well as the AI bits. Nothing is running locally on the device. There’s nothing the rabbit device does that couldn’t be done via an app or web portal to those cloud services instead.
At least with the Humane AI Pin it was an attempt to create a new class of device. The rabbit r1 however is effectively just an oddly shaped Android phone locked to running a single app. The only reason it seems to exist is to allow an existing hardware company to jump on the AI bandwagon.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 6 months ago
Makes sense, they can do whatever they want with AOSP as long as they don’t want to call it ‘Android’ to have access to Play Store.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
What would prevent an Android app from having “deep integration with AI”? If the AI is in the cloud then it’s all done through normal web requests, which don’t even require a permission, let alone so special allowance from Google.
jj4211@lemmy.world 6 months ago
One amendment, I’d say it’s because existing phones won’t let an app have access to listening for a wake word or phrase, and a phone hard codes that to the phone vendor code. Having passive access to microphone and camera and activating and showing what they want to the screen without contending with a platform lock screen that won’t play ball with them, that sort of thing. “AI” access wasn’t really going to be the challenge.
It’s not that they didn’t run on existing phones, I could see that, I find it more stupid that they stopped short of just making their device a phone capable of traditional interaction. As it stands it’s going to be a subset of capability of phones coming out this year that will likely offer similar “AI” features while also continuing to support traditional hand held usage. If they didn’t want to sign up for all that, they probably could have teamed up with someone like Motorola, who might be hungry enough to let Rabbit do their thing on a Moto G variant or something.
egeres@lemmy.world 6 months ago
How many android apps are designed by teenage engineering?
gex@lemmy.world 6 months ago
At least this one:
nomadjoanne@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah in the presentation of it was clearly idiotic. I often wonder how seriously these silicon valley people actually take themselves privately.
grahamja@reddthat.com 6 months ago
Don’t these people just pitch wild ideas constantly knowing it won’t work in the hopes they can live off of someone’s venture capital until they can end up with better jobs?
djsaskdja@reddthat.com 6 months ago
Fake it until you make it.
aniki@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Anyone have a hacked APK? I wanna test it out.
Dkarma@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s just chat gpt dude
cyrus@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Yeah that’s the function, playing around with it would still be fun though? Especially data mining and seeing what else there is apart from the LAM server leak.
aniki@lemm.ee 6 months ago
So? I wanna fuck with their implementation of it.
Alpha71@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“Duh”
fubarx@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Big whoop. MediaTek eval kits offer either Linux or Android AOSP. Why is this news?
moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Any link to the r1 running doom or Minecraft?
thequantumcog@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well, looks like rabbit is taking down these videos 😂. All of the videos of rabbit r1 running doom or Minecraft are now private. Still found one on twitter. Image
moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Thanks! It looks like that they aren’t happy with them.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I thought we always knew that the device was going to be Android.
It’s crazy you can just download and run it on any other android device though. If have thought they’d have locked it down somewhat.
notannpc@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I never really understood who these products were for. I can’t help but think the only end result is a small number of people getting rich off of VC money and some misguidedly optimistic folks getting ripped off by buying these devices.
PhAzE@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
These products male no sense on the age of smart phones. They will end up just being an app we download or free features of our phones at some point.
lobut@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
R1s statement in response from the article:
So there’s literally no reason for this to have been a device at all.
infeeeee@lemm.ee 6 months ago
But it’s android, so linux, so GPL2, so they have to share these modifications (if they really exist). It’s bootleg until soneone sues them.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 6 months ago
You’d be surprised how many companies ignore GPL. Providing broken links to the source code tarballs, telling you to send an email request to get the code then proceed to ignore the requests, etc. Only the most famous case got sued, the rest simply got away with it.
cyrus@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
The Linux Kernel is GPL2, the Android OS is Apache.
woodgen@lemm.ee 6 months ago
AOSP is not GPL
VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Was that in question? I thought it was clear from the beginning that it does pretty much everything in the cloud.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah, if you weren’t convinced this was a waste of money before finding out that it’s like this, you’re not going to be convinced by this.
bcgm3@lemmy.world 6 months ago
No rea$on at all, except for that one little rea$on that we alway$ $eem to keep coming back to…
theherk@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Except that some people may like this form factor for these features. Of course it can be delivered in phones, but it does seem at least possible to me that some may prefer a device like this.
jkrtn@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
I love the dumb little form factors those guys do. The only thing stopping me is that I know it is overhyped bullshit which I will be bored of in a week. If it were easy to develop my own software to completely replace what’s on it I might be convinced.
lobut@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
They’re possibly complimentary but not mutually exclusive. I think if they sold the form factor of the device over the phone that that would have been more honest marketing.