After all, the Rabbit R1’s launcher app is intended to be preinstalled in the firmware and be granted several privileged, system-level permissions — only some of which we were able to grant — so some of the functions would likely fail if we tried
And the statement from Rabbit in the article says essentially the same:
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
Just from a pure marketing perspective, look at all the insane hype they were able to generate due to possibility of a new physical form factor.
There’s no way in hell they could have generated $10M in pre-orders and potentially hundreds of millions in earned media coverage for the 700th app that’s basically a chatgpt api wrapper.
But I really meant what I said too. It doesn’t matter how great your thing is, people complain to high health about spending $.99 on it. And God forbid you want to subscription even if it’s only $2 a year. And don’t ask for an IAP of any kind.
The app market is a disaster of ads because almost no one will accept anything else.
Even if everything ran fully on the device so they didn’t have any server costs of any kind I think they’d have a very very hard time making money off an app unless it was incredibly extraordinary.
If it's just an app...their hardware has no reason to exist AND they are competing directly with Google/Microsoft.
I mean the question is kind of vaguely legitimate, but regardeless of how it is implemented one could ask why it is not an Android app instead. They thought about it and made other choices, and might not want to publicly list all the reasons that made them choose what they did...
