The rabbit device has been getting a lot of flax since it dropped. It's an AI device, of course, that it's like its own thing. You can go take pictures with it and ask it what it sees. It uses AI to give you feedback.
It can answer all sorts of questions. It's supposed to be like a personal companion. And what a lot of people are saying, you know, they can do everything that a smartphone can do. They're saying, look, this is a totally unique device.
It's only, I think, like 300 bucks or 200 bucks. So it's not like crazy expensive compared to something like the CUMING pin. But recently, it has been getting a ton of extra flax. People have realized that essentially it is just an Android phone.
It's running on Android. It's doing everything an Android phone has done. They've cracked it. They've released an APK.
There's a ton going on that's really interesting. I'm going to be reading a bunch of different comments over on X-Twitter that have been going over this. Emily Shepard kind of did a whole roundup thread on this that I got a lot of great data from. So shout out to Emily.
But I want to go over the whole drama because the CEO of Rabbit has been tweeting and people have been tweeting at him. And there's tons going on. They're so excited. So let's kick this all off.
So this all kind of got started back on April 30th, Marcel put out a tweet. He said, OK, so people already cracked the Rabbit R1 and found out it's Android. People duped the APK. And I got it working with Root and a few mods on a standard phone.
So he literally got this thing running on a regular Android. It does all this stuff. When you shake it, just like the regular device, it lets you ask a question. It's doing everything that the regular Rabbit device can do.
Now, there's some really big security issues with being able to do this. And I'm going to go over them. But I did want to say, after he tweeted that out and he showed kind of a video demo of him using it, we got a response from the actual team over at Rabbit. And they said, Rabbit R1 is not an Android app.
We're aware that there are some unofficial Rabbit OS app slash web site emulators out there. Rabbit is customized for the R1, whatever, whatever. So they have this whole tweet about how it's, this is definitely not just an app. Because that's kind of the criticism of how it's going to be.
And I'm like, hey, cool, cool, cool, whatever. It looks cool, it looks fun, but like, why isn't this just an app? Why do you have to sell an entire device? Why aren't you just making an app out of this?
So their response also included a very interesting claim that they essentially, when they're saying this is an app, they're saying that they're using quote. And this all comes from their Discord server, by the way. But they're using quote, very bestowake, AOSP, and lower level firmware modifications. So yeah, anyways, Jesse had a previous claim where he said that this was a very heavily modified AOSP.
And AOSP means Android open source project. So essentially, this is kind of like Android without Google's code. So there's no Gmail or OK Google embedded into this. But it's essentially Android.
And that's kind of the purpose of Android. It was an open source project. So anyone can go and kind of use this. But you don't get all of the cool Google features if you're just forking it and using open source versus actually being on the Android ecosystem.
So in any case, they're saying, yeah, we use that. We heavily modified it, whatever. That was kind of their thing. So then we have Jess Liu, who is the CEO of Rabbit.
He went to X and he kind of got mad at Mr. Orama, who's kind of the author of the Android Authority piece. That's an article that was written on Android Authority. And when they essentially said that this is an issue, and he said, quote, why that bootleg APK is not working, try now.
And you know, pretty much like taunting him being like, we fixed the air. We fixed the crack or the leak or whatever. So you won't be able to use that APK anymore. And I think a lot of people have said this is kind of a bland response and it wasn't very professional.
They should have probably acknowledged the flaw and tried to secure their API and then moved on. But instead, because it's kind of goading him, you can kind of imagine what happens next. So now everyone wants to go and hack this APK and go use it. So Mr.
Orama then wrote another article. This time he was kind of directly challenging some of the claims that Rabbit was making. He includes an uncut video that showed him installing the R1 app onto a normal phone. And its features worked just fine.
So of course, this is kind of refuting and not making them look really good. Marcel, who kind of made that original video of the crack responded to showing that it worked again on his device, because Jesse was the CEO of Rabbit was saying, oh, we fixed it. We shut down the thing with our security. And both of them are showing like, no, it still works.
They also said that Rabbit's I am checking didn't actually work. I am the eye is a unique identifier for mobile devices. So it's pretty much not checking that your account was only working for one device. Why does all of this matter?
There's a couple things. I'll go more into the drama. But one of the really big issues here is that this is a device you buy one time and it doesn't have a subscription. But if you're hooked up to like, it's costing money to run these AI models.
And so people are like, how is this working? How are you going to buy it and get a subscription? I'm going to stop supporting this at some point. A contrary to like the humane AI pin where when you're wearing the humane pin, it's like $700.
But then you got to pay, I can't remember like $50 a month or something like that to keep getting serviced, which is essentially paying for the cloud and the usage of all the different AI models, right? So this is interesting. We then had THEL31, who demoed that the R1 app running on. A different Android device could be instructed to save notes back to Rabbit's official backend, which they call the rabbit hole.
So this is also not good because it's not just like, they cracked it and they forked it. And now you can kind of use the same technology and slap your own white label on it. You literally can crack it and then still have it like your new device be saving things on to the rabbit backend, which they're definitely paying for. So this is obviously a big security issue.
Someone else also showed that you could use the R1. So on the R1 device, it's got like this little scroller on the side of the device. And they want you to use that. It has like a screen and people have demonstrated that it's actually fully functioning touchscreen, aka pretty much an Android phone.
But it's actually disabled mostly unless there's like, I think one or two things that you can do that enable the touchscreen, but mostly they want you to use a scroll bar, kind of reminds me of the original iPod classics where you had like the scroll wheel to like scroll. They just have like a little rolling bar, like a roller on like a mouse that you can use to scroll. People have complained about it about whatever. I mean, it works, but what people have also showed, they're like, look, you could literally enable this on an Android TV because it's just an Android app.
And if you have it on Android TV with the mouse, clicking up and down on a mouse is this equivalent of scrolling because the scroll wheel sends deep head actions, just like a TV remote keyboard or any other accessory that you have. So that's really interesting. Then we had Chromo Mob who is showing that the vision feature on the R1 app, which is running on his phone, right? So everyone's just like turned it into an app and was running on their phone.
He could essentially read and understand a bunch of things from Rabbit's own Discord server. So, you know, he's just kind of making fun of them. It has also been demonstrated a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways that the R1 does not run on a very heavily modified or what they say bespoke AOSP. So kind of that was a lie, if I'm being 100% honest, right?
Like they said that, but obviously if you can just put this on an Android phone, then it's not true. It's not running on anything custom. I don't think anyone really cares that the R1 is just based on Android, but I think that people do care that the official Rabbit CEO and the company of Rabbit are saying that this is definitely not an app. I'd probably saying that for like investor reasons or for, I don't know, to try to make it seem like the big criticism is like, why aren't you just an app?
And they're like, well, you know, we're like super different, super unique, super custom. So, I mean, it's a cool device in any like, either way, in my opinion, but like, it's definitely a bad look having to lie to everyone and telling them it's something that it's not. So, I think Rabbit right now though, regardless of this whole PR nightmare that they might be having, I think they actually have bigger problems on their hands right now. And that is the fact that if you can run the R1 on a different phone, what's to stop you from running it on a different device entirely?
And what's to stop someone from taking the app, Rabbit R1's API, you know, and putting it on a device and slapping their logo on it, and then essentially making Rabbit pick up the tab for it. Or if you are super malicious, you could run thousands of virtual R1s in the cloud and completely overwhelm Rabbit system. Like, it just seems like it's a really big security issue. All of this is theoretically possible because while your activity is tied to an account in the Rabbit hole, accounts only need an email address to set up.
So, email addresses are really cheap, and an attacker could make an account, but as many accounts as they want really. So, the problem is pretty much unique to Rabbit because all the other AI services are subscription based. So, that means that user accounts on these services are tied to a payment method. And the bank has to do, like most of the heavy lifting to verify the user's identity.
Emily recently on X was saying that it seems pretty inconceivable that they wouldn't have thought about any of this before launching. By then, it also seems inconceivable that their security would be so easily bypassed twice, or that they would try to pretend that their app wasn't an app. It's obviously just an app, right? So, I think this is interesting.
This is obviously a huge mess that Rabbit's gonna have to sort out. If the big problem here though, in my opinion, is like, it's gonna be tricky for them to try and change their API without completely breaking a bunch of the older devices. And it seems like this is probably something they should have figured out before launching, but you know, this is V1 of a product, this is kind of what happens. So, yeah, very interesting.
We haven't gotten any updates in over 24 hours from Rabbit. So, I'll definitely keep you up to date if they say anything else. But this is definitely a huge drama, very interesting. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.
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