The issue is that Rabbit's founders marketed the R1 device as having abilities that surpass that of your smartphone. They sold the device as if it itself actually does something useful that your existing devices can't.
But now we can see that it is just a weird shaped Android phone hard-coded to only run one app. It shatters the illusion that the R1 hardware was worth the $200 price tag, as the software under-the-hood could be equally if not more functional if it were just distributed as an app instead of as a piece of hardware.
It would be different if the hardware had special sensors and processors that help maximize its functionality. There would be no issue for AOSP to be the base OS - in fact I would agree with your assessment that it was a good decision that should e celebrated. The hardware itself having novel capabilities would be the important aspect, not the OS they chose to build upon.
Absent any special hardware functionality, it throws the entire Rabbit business model into question. They aren't charging licensing fees, and the service itself seems to be a lifetime subscription, so they aren't planning on making money selling software or SaaS services. The profit-making part of this business is selling hardware - and the hardware is just a worse version of the phone you already have...
The software also seems barely useful. Pretty much just a bare-bones implementation of speech-to-text, GPT via REST API, and text-to-speech, with a handful of basic integrations.
So once they've sold you the hardware, do they have any reason at all to improve the software or the service's offerings? If the R1 hardware can't do anything your phone can't, can they really compete with an app (even a paid app) that does the same thing on your almost certainly higher-spec'd smartphone?
Given the founders' history of grifting, I am going to guess that the R1 hardware costs Rabbit <$50, and that the company will soon disappear, taking down any expensive cloud-based AI functionality with them, as soon as they feel they've sold enough units to line their pockets with the profits, and the R1 owners will be left with a brick.
But now we can see that it is just a weird shaped Android phone hard-coded to only run one app. It shatters the illusion that the R1 hardware was worth the $200 price tag, as the software under-the-hood could be equally if not more functional if it were just distributed as an app instead of as a piece of hardware.
It would be different if the hardware had special sensors and processors that help maximize its functionality. There would be no issue for AOSP to be the base OS - in fact I would agree with your assessment that it was a good decision that should e celebrated. The hardware itself having novel capabilities would be the important aspect, not the OS they chose to build upon.
Absent any special hardware functionality, it throws the entire Rabbit business model into question. They aren't charging licensing fees, and the service itself seems to be a lifetime subscription, so they aren't planning on making money selling software or SaaS services. The profit-making part of this business is selling hardware - and the hardware is just a worse version of the phone you already have...
The software also seems barely useful. Pretty much just a bare-bones implementation of speech-to-text, GPT via REST API, and text-to-speech, with a handful of basic integrations.
So once they've sold you the hardware, do they have any reason at all to improve the software or the service's offerings? If the R1 hardware can't do anything your phone can't, can they really compete with an app (even a paid app) that does the same thing on your almost certainly higher-spec'd smartphone?
Given the founders' history of grifting, I am going to guess that the R1 hardware costs Rabbit <$50, and that the company will soon disappear, taking down any expensive cloud-based AI functionality with them, as soon as they feel they've sold enough units to line their pockets with the profits, and the R1 owners will be left with a brick.