Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Rabbit may be working on a fully functional R1 app for iPhones.
- The company has strongly pushed back against claims that its service is “just an app.”
- Could that position now be softening in the wake of R1 hardware controversy?
2024 is sure shaping up to be a year chock-full of tech blunders. And more than just IT gaffes like the recent CrowdStrike disaster, we’ve seen plenty of commercial products really crash and burn. First we struggled to find a good use case for the Humane AI pin, and then it wasn’t long before the Rabbit R1 had us wondering, “why is this even a hardware gadget, and not just an app?” The curious story of the Rabbit R1 continues today, as we hear about the company’s software surfacing in an unexpected location.
The Rabbit R1 has been utterly mired in controversy, whether over evidence suggesting its claims of AI-powered functionality were misleading at best, or the massive security gaps that left users exposed. But this whole mess really got started when people began realizing that the R1 was basically just an Android app on a low-powered phone. Rabbit pushed back against such claims, insisting that its cloud servers were doing the heavy lifting, and that its software relied on all these low-level firmware mods… but never really satisfying anyone’s questions about why the company’s service couldn’t just be made to run as an app on their existing phone.
The future of Rabbit and its R1 are still incredibly uncertain, but this weird story is absolutely getting even weirder. It’s ultimately not that surprising that inquisitive minds were able to extract the Android software from Rabbit’s hardware — nor that Android was even what it ran in the first place. So why does there also seem to exist a Rabbit R1 iOS app?
Over on Threads, Joan Westenberg posts that she’s discovered the Rabbit R1 app on TestFlight, Apple’s service used by iOS devs when they want to beta test software on actual iPhone hardware. And before you wonder if this is some kind of limited companion app, Westenberg clarifies that it appears to be same set of functionality from the Android app/R1 itself.
Why in the world would Rabbit be working on a project like that? Unlikely as it may sound, the answer could be as simple as the company really is considering abandoning its hardware model, and transitioning to an app-based service. We would not have guessed Rabbit might pursue a course like this, but it actually would make a lot of sense — if your current approach isn’t working, change things up.
Of course, that’s just our speculation for the moment, but it’s difficult to think of many other good reasons for the company to be pouring development resources into an effort like this.
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