Introducing the agentic robotics appstore for 10,000 Reachy Minis
Today we're shipping an agentic toolkit for Reachy Mini, our open-source desktop robot. You describe the behavior you want in plain English, and an AI agent writes, tests, ships the code to the robot and iterates with you to get it working. No SDK to learn, no robotics background needed.
If you have a Reachy Mini (or just want to play in the browser simulator), you can get started right now by asking your favorite agent something like:
Help me build a Reachy Mini app that waves and says hello when
someone walks into the room.
Use the open-source code at https://github.com/pollen-robotics/reachy_mini
and the docs at https://huggingface.co/docs/reachy_mini/index
So far, the community has shipped over 200 apps, built by 150+ different creators, most of whom had never written robotics code before. Last week another batch of almost 3,000 robots went out to customers worldwide, taking the install base to nearly 10,000 units in the wild. More than 1,000 additional units will ship in the next 30 days.
For sixty years, robots were built by roboticists. When the hardware is open-source, the software is open-source, and an AI agent can write the code, the gating that used to come from technical knowledge mostly disappears.
Meet Joel Cohen, age 78
Joel is not a developer. He's the founder of CEO Stars, in the Raleigh-Durham area who runs CEO peer groups. He's never worked in robotics, never coded. It took him a few days to assemble his Reachy Mini Lite (which usually takes around 3 hours). He actually did it perfectly, but misplaced a few screws that delayed the build-out.
Then he built an app.
Joel built a voice-controlled AI co-facilitator for the CEO peer groups he runs on Zoom. Reachy Mini sits on his desk. When he says "Hey Reachy," it wakes up, listens, and responds. It has a personality (his "VP of Future Thinking"), four facilitation modes, a bank of 60+ questions, and greets each of his 29 members by name. Mid-session, it can hot-seat a member, push back on a surface-level answer, generate a fresh question on the spot, or summarize the key themes before closing.
In Joel's own words: "I built this by describing what I needed in plain English. Claude wrote the code. No SDK. No robotics background. No developer experience."
A 78-year-old executive in North Carolina just built a robotics product that didn't exist last month. And it's all open-source code that anyone can fork, change, and run on their own robot.
How the app store works (and why it's open by default)
Every Reachy Mini app lives on the Hugging Face Hub as an open-source repo. Searchable, forkable, one-click installable. See an app you like? Duplicate the repo, ask the agent to change it ("make it answer in French and play a song when I win"), publish your version. The original creator gets credit, you get a working app in minutes, and the next person can fork yours.
Every app also runs in a browser-based simulator, so anyone can play with the catalog without owning the hardware.
A few of the 200 apps already up:
- Cook assistant, walking you through a recipe step by step, hands-free
- Language tutor, which listens to you and corrects your accent
- Emotional Damage Chess, which plays you at chess and reacts to every move, dropping its head on a blunder ("Oh no! Big mistake!") and cheering on a winning combination
- Reachy Phone Home, which detects when you pick up your phone and calls you back to work
- Red Light, Green Light, the Squid Game kids' version, with the robot playing the doll
- F1 race commentator, calling Formula 1 races as they happen, live from your desk
- Coding teacher, teaching kids to program in a simplified scripting language
Plus home assistants, dance apps, video games, blind tests, Clawbot and OpenClaw interfaces, and more being published every day.
I built one myself last week, an office receptionist, in under two hours. The full process is here and the result is here.
None of these apps existed six months ago. None of them required a robotics degree to build. And every single one of them is open-source.
Why open-source matters here
For the entire history of robotics, three things stood between an idea and a working robot: expertise, expensive hardware, and weeks of integration work. Open-source plus AI agents is closing the gap on all three. The expertise is supplemented by an agent that has read the docs and the code. The hardware is an affordable, open-source desktop robot you can buy, build, mod, or print parts for. The integration is a public repo on a Hub that millions of developers already use.
We could have built this as a closed app store with a 30% cut. We didn't, and we won't. Closed app stores have done real damage to what people are allowed to build for the devices they own. Robots are going to be in homes, schools, hospitals, and offices for the next several decades. The platform underneath them needs to be one that anyone can read, fork, audit, and improve. Open-source is the only way that ends well.
The closest historical parallel I can think of is the launch of the iPhone App Store in 2008, which turned phones from devices made by phone companies into platforms anyone could build for. The Reachy Mini app store is making a similar bet about robots, but in the open. The hardware is open-source. The software is open-source. The apps are open-source. Even the agent traces are public. The whole stack is forkable.
We have no idea what people are going to build. The 78-year-old in North Carolina, the 13-year-old learning Python, the small business owner in Lyon, the teacher in Nairobi. Every one of them now has a path from "I wonder if a robot could..." to a working app, in under an hour, on a stack they actually own.
Try it now
- Browse the Reachy Mini app store (200+ apps): huggingface.co/reachy-mini#/apps
- Build your own by asking ML Intern or your favorite agent the prompt at the top of this post
- Open-source robot code: github.com/pollen-robotics/reachy_mini
- Docs: huggingface.co/docs/reachy_mini/index
- Buy a Reachy Mini: huggingface.co/reachy-mini
If you build something, post it on the Hub and tag me. I read everything, and I'll be installing a lot of new apps this month.
