- 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.