- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
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.
Edit: Someone also got doom and Minecraft running on this thing
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R1s statement in response from 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.”
So there’s literally no reason for this to have been a device at all.
Was that in question? I thought it was clear from the beginning that it does pretty much everything in the cloud.
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.
AOSP and lower level firmware modifications
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.
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.
Yes, I know, but that shouldn’t be a norm.
There was a case this year, where SFC, a nonprofit organization won against Vizio for LGPL violation. It’s important, because SFC was just a normal consumer, not the owner of the original code. So now just a random user can sue this Rabbit company, and they should win, more details here: https://blog.lukaspanni.de/2024/01/09/the-significance-of-the-vizio-judgment-for-open-source-compliance-programs/
Edit: the case is not settled yet, but ongoing since 2021: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
And there are other funny solutions, like when a Chinese “tech influencer/diy maker” Naomi Wu aka SexyCyborg just simply walked into the office of a Chinese manufacturer, and requested the source code in person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Vj04MKykmnQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The Linux Kernel is GPL2, the Android OS is Apache.
AOSP is not GPL
They wrote “lower level firmware modifications”, AOSP runs on Linux kernel, and firmware modifications usually mean they modified the Linux kernel. This device seems like a regular Android phone, and afaik this rules apply to all Android phones, that’s why Android rom cooking can exist.
They may be compelled to release any driver code associated, however firmware is not covered by relation to kernel. Linux runs on mostly proprietary firmware. The “linux-firmware” package in many distributions that contains hot plug firmware is mostly proprietary blobs.
That said I doubt they had much significant firmware work, it may just be logo and some tweaked configuration from their SoC vendor. They likely had to modify AOSP a bit more to allow their launcher unfettered access to the device in ways not modeled by standard AOSP, but that’s user space that isn’t GPL.
This was a marketing post, not a technical one. Unless we see any git branches or ROM teardown we won’t know what they were doing. I highly doubt that they did any kernel patches though.
No rea$on at all, except for that one little rea$on that we alway$ $eem to keep coming back to…
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.
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.
Technically you can’t call it “Android” without paying Google for certification and play store/gapps license. It’s AOSP.
Just so you know, AOSP is short for Android Open Source Project.
They should just do it recursive like GNU and make it the AOSP stand for the “AOSP Open Source Project.”
The term “Android” itself is trademarked and can’t be used by hardware manufacturers without passing certification and paying Google.
doesn’t mean it’s not running Android, they just cannot use it for marketing/branding 🥴
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Dude, maybe it was meant to be a joke, but that doom picture is so fake. C’mon.
His point still stands as the image in the thumbnail is as fake as it gets.
Hehe, thumbnail.
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
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.
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
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 SteamDeck (edited to add the most famous), 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.
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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.
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.
If they weeded out some of the shittier ideas they’d be one in nine or eight.
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.
Do you not carry 3 phones already? Just swap one out.
Do you guys not have 3 phones?
Wait until people realize that it’s just ChatGPT.
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. Rn I agree that it’s just a worse ChatGPT.
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.
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.
Lol. “Why are you all happy?! Stop having fun!” I bought it and I’m satisfied with it. If you don’t see the appeal, that’s ok. Just don’t buy it.
Haha can’t run R1 on an iPhone. Take that Apple. Absolute gamechanger.
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.
gpt4kids. It has a rabbit!
Rabbit is paying for processing those Ai requests. If everyone starts to download it to their android devices they will literally go bankrupt
lol
What’s with the terribly shopped doom pic?
I was lazy to find the real picture. So, I just posted the first one I found.
You do realize that your statements now seem less credible than if you had left that picture out, right?
It’s the internet. Nobody has any credibility.
I vouch for @foggy’s credibility. You can trust that guy
Trust me, I’m a credibilianist.
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.
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.
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.
there’s nothing the rabbit device does that couldn’t be done via an app
Currently, the Rabbit does 2 things for me that can’t be an app on my phone.
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It’s not my phone. I value this enough to pay for it. I spend more time than I would like on my phone. I’m happy when I can use another single purpose device to help me stay focused.
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The push to talk hardware button has been more pleasant for me to use than the ChatGPT shortcut on my Pixel phone.
In the end, the ChatGPT + Perplexity in a box fills a space in my life that I can’t find anywhere else—given my criteria.
I understand your criteria is different and you value different things. That’s ok. It just means this device isn’t for you.
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Makes sense, they can do whatever they want with AOSP as long as they don’t want to cert it as ‘Android’ to have access to Play Store.
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.
Apps can absolutely listen for a wake word tho
Yeah in the presentation of it was clearly idiotic. I often wonder how seriously these silicon valley people actually take themselves privately.
Anyone have a hacked APK? I wanna test it out.
It’s just chat gpt dude
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.
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).
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.
Broadcom is actually terrible, the Rpi foundation just had an in.
NXP deserves some credit for good board support packages and documentation.
How many android apps are designed by teenage engineering?
At least this one:
