At this point, we all have seen that retro-looking, bright orange not-phone that claims to do many things just with a voice command. The Rabbit R1 is the talk of the town these days, both for positive and negative reasons. While its design looks refreshing thanks to physical buttons and a scroll wheel along with the large action model (LAM — more on that later) that looks to have some serious chops, the Rabbit R1 turned out to be nothing but an Android app. So, do the Rabbit R1 and the like deserve to exist as standalone devices, or should they be repackaged into an app for your current smartphone or smartwatch?
New details reveal why the Rabbit R1 should have been an app all along
All you need is an Android phone and the R1 launcher APK, apparently
The cat rabbit is out of the bag
The Rabbit R1 turned out to be exactly what we expected
If you look beyond that catchy design, the Rabbit R1 has a lot going on in the backend to quickly serve you results compiled by the company’s AI tech. When you ask the phone to play one of your Spotify playlists or recognize what the camera sees, it pings the cloud, where the real processing happens. Rabbit’s executives often talk about its large action model (LAM), which is actually what takes the action on your behalf. Rabbit has trained its LAM on various common apps like Spotify to get the job done with a simple voice command.
Since all the heavy lifting happens in the cloud, the R1 itself is nothing more than a rudimentary interface that doesn’t require high-end hardware to run — hence the device’s low price. Rabbit has always claimed this was the case, but it never got into the nitty-gritty of how the on-device UX actually worked. But Android expert Mishaal Rahman confirmed what had been speculated: the Rabbit R1 basically runs an Android app (via Android Authority).
Rahman even ported it to a Pixel 6a, making it work almost entirely until Rabbit tracked down his little experiment and squashed it from its servers. The company obviously wasn’t pleased by this supposed breach and stressed that it wouldn’t allow such third-party clients to run Rabbit’s services in a rather frantically puerile statement to the outlet. Rahman was quick to prove the claims in the statement to be stretched with even more digging and had the Rabbit R1’s OS running on an unrooted Xiaomi 13T Pro.
Rabbit could’ve easily lost itself in the sea of AI apps
There is exactly zero practical reason why the Rabbit R1 couldn’t have been just an app on your existing phone. But if that were indeed the case, it would’ve ended up being just another AI app, despite the impressive things happening in the background with LAM — something other companies haven’t been able to pull off. Rabbit says that it has already trained LAM on many apps, and the only thing holding it back from supporting all of them is a user interface for the Rabbit R1.
The Rabbit R1 is one of the most unique pieces of hardware we’ve come across in a long time. It has a minimal, retro design with a physical scroll wheel and a single camera that swivels in the direction you want it to point at. On top of that, you need to pay just $200 to own it with no subscription attached, which is far more affordable (and even forgivable) than the Humane AI Pin.
Rabbit needed every single one of those factors, from the catchy design to a tempting price, to create a viral buzz that wouldn’t have been possible without a hardware story to tell. Had it been an app, the popularity graph would’ve hit rock bottom even before it could peak. That’s the only plausible reason for the Rabbit R1 to exist in the first place.
The device exists not to replace your existing phone — it’s just not capable enough and has far too many cracks to fill. I’ve already argued at length how dedicated AI devices aren’t worth your time and the devices that could more seamlessly integrate generative AI into our everyday lives have already existed for at least a decade. The Rabbit R1 has no business existing as a product rather than a service, and that could be a potential area of interest for a big shark like Google which is always on the lookout for smaller fish in the sea.
Google, go feed the rabbit
Maybe that’s what Google Assistant needs
Big Tech acquires more early-stage startups than many of us realize. It might come as a shocker to some, but Apple didn’t develop Siri and FaceID from scratch in-house. It instead acquired the companies that made them and integrated them into its devices as if they always belonged there. Google has also done the same but on a much grander scale — we’re talking about Android, YouTube, and Nest.
The point is that such niche applications often find their higher calling when they land in the hands of a more sprawling business where their capabilities could find better use and wider reach. As we’re propelling toward a far more advanced automation level on our devices than we’re currently used to, Google Assistant is primed to become more adept at doing stuff inside apps on your behalf. While that so far seems like gradual progress, Google could fast-track it with the help of Rabbit’s LAM, which is already trained on dozens of apps, if the company’s claims are indeed true.
Now that we know what the Rabbit R1 actually is under the hood, there remains no doubt that Rabbit and Google Assistant are made for each other. While one big downside of the R1 is its incompatibility with the majority of apps we use daily, this could change rather quickly with the help of Google, which runs the most popular mobile operating system and an app store to go with it.
What is the Rabbit R1? The AI phone without apps explained
And why is the internet going crazy for it?
If this tight integration turns into reality, you won’t need to carry yet another device in your pocket. Any of the top Android smartwatches can take over the AI duties, taking in-app actions with a simple voice command — bonus points if they could make it all work offline for even faster results. And you can pull out your phone anytime to handle something you need a bigger screen for. It’s a win-win for both users and the companies.
So, Google and Rabbit, I’m open to helping negotiate this deal. Let me know.
