Rokid
Rokid for third-party developers — SDK access, app model, distribution, capabilities & AI, and where it sits in the 2026 smart-glasses landscape.
Verified 2026-08-24 against primary sources
Openness verdict. Openly documented, registration-free developer suite with a bimodal openness story: the native glasses/phone SDKs ship as AARs with no public source repo (only the glasses SDK publishes a partial sources jar on Rokid's own Maven), while the on-glasses AIUI app framework — a JavaScript + Ink web-style runtime (JSAR) — is open source (Apache-2.0). Four dev axes ship in parallel (phone companion, on-glasses native, on-glasses AIUI web-runtime apps, and cloud/bring-your-own-model agents), with an unusually open third-party-AI path. Distribution is the least-settled part: sideload-to-glasses (phone app, WebUSB, community stores) works today, but the first-party store and review pipeline that has shipped — the Rokid Agent Store, published to via the Rizon platform — covers AIUI agents rather than on-glasses native binaries.
Covered here: Rokid Glasses (2025) · Rokid AI Glasses Style (2026).
Not covered here: Rokid Max / Max Pro · Rokid AR Lite / AR Spatial · Rokid Station / Station 2 · Rokid Dock.
Overview
Rokid is a Hangzhou-based XR/AI-wearables maker. Rokid Glasses (launched Aug 27 2025, newsroom) are 49 g standalone AI+HUD glasses and the in-scope device here. Hardware snapshot: dual-eye monochrome-green Micro-LED engines on a diffractive optical waveguide (480×400 per eye, up to 1500 nits; the product page cites a 30° FOV while launch coverage cited ~23°), a 12MP Sony IMX681 first-person camera (fixed-focus, no AF), 4 directional microphones, 2 speakers, Wi-Fi 6 / BT 5.3, 2 GB RAM / 32 GB storage, 210 mAh battery. Compute is standalone (Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 for the app OS + an NXP RT600 for low-power voice/wake), not a dumb phone peripheral — but a paired phone (Hi Rokid app) drives setup, heavy AI and most third-party UX. Price is $699 (list $799); shipping globally now (fees and delivery times vary by destination, shown at checkout). Out of scope: the birdbath Max viewers and Station-puck-driven AR Lite/Spatial (tethered/controller AR). A display-less sibling, Rokid AI Glasses Style ($349, 38.5 g, camera+audio only), shares the ecosystem but has no HUD.
What you can buy
| Model | Price | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Rokid Glasses global.rokid.com ↗ | $699.00 sale price against a $799.00 compare-at price, marked "12% OFF", USD, on global.rokid.com. Ex-VAT for EU, UK and Canada buyers — the product page states "VAT for EU, UK, and Canada is calculated at checkout." Shipping is additional: "Shipping calculated at checkout." | On sale |
| Rokid AI Glasses Style (Non-Display) global.rokid.com ↗ | "Regular price $349.00 / Sale price $349.00" (no discount) on the global.rokid.com cart page; the marketing page hero states "Starting at $349 Ex. tax". USD, explicitly ex-tax per the vendor's own label, and ex-VAT for EU, UK and Canada buyers — "VAT for EU, UK, and Canada is calculated at checkout." Prescription lenses are a separate line: "Starting at $79". | On sale |
Cheapest way to run your own code: The cheapest Rokid device that runs third-party code is Rokid Glasses at $699.00 USD (regular price $799.00, badged "12% OFF"), ex-VAT. The $349.00 Rokid AI Glasses Style is cheaper but has "No in-lens display" and appears nowhere in Rokid's developer documentation, which covers only "Rokid Glass3" / "Glass3 Enterprise".
What the listings leave out
Rokid Glasses
- One purchase configuration on the global product page ("Rokid Glasses with Display"), with no colour or finish selector.
- The shipping-origin wording differs from the sibling AI Glasses Style page ("outside the EU" here versus "outside the EU and US" there), so the two products' terms should not be treated as interchangeable.
- Duty amounts are unquantified: Rokid says only that orders "may incur duties" and that customers "may need to assist with clearance".
- Currency on store.rokid.com is resolved geographically by the serving edge, so the CAD figures cannot be attributed to a specific buyer region.
- The $699 sale price sits against a $799 compare-at price with a "12% OFF" badge, and the global page shows no promotion end date, so it is not stated whether $699 is the standing price or a temporary one.
Rokid AI Glasses Style (Non-Display)
- Ships with "Black-Gray Lenses" by default in two listed colours (Black, Gray); the "200+ color options" figure refers to the optional prescription lens service (Deep Myopia, Astigmatism, Progressive, Presbyopia up to +15.00 D), not frame SKUs, and the standard package excludes prescription frame, capsule battery, charging case and lenses.
- Rokid's own site carries conflicting prices: the marketing page's "Choose Your Style" block shows "$299" labelled "Includes the glasses" with a Buy Now link, while the hero and the cart page both say $349. $299 plus the "Starting at $79" lens service does not reconcile to $349, and no $299 option exists on the cart page, so $349 is the price of record.
- The hero labels the figure "Ex. tax" but the cart page shows a bare "$349.00", so the ex-tax qualifier is not repeated at the point of purchase.
- Duty amounts are unquantified for buyers outside the EU and US.
- Currency on store.rokid.com is resolved geographically by the serving edge, so the CAD figures cannot be pinned to a stated region.
Access
The developer surface centers on Rokid's connected-XR SDKs, documented at x-docs.rokid.com and the Rokid Open Platform (ar.rokid.com/sdk redirects here).
| SDK | The official docs frame it as a Glasses SDK (device side) + Phone SDK (companion) pairing targeting 'Rokid Glass3' |
| Languages | The Glasses/Phone SDKs are Kotlin/Java (Android) and native iOS for companions. Languages/frameworks are broader than the native SDKs alone: a second, materially different toolchain exists for on-glasses AIUI apps — JavaScript + the 'Ink' declarative UI framework (.ink single-file components) running on the JSAR (JavaScript-AR) web-style runtime |
| How it connects | The phone companion connects over BLE / Wi-Fi Direct; on-glasses apps run natively on YodaOS-Sprite (an Android-12/API-32-based OS) and talk to the phone over a bidirectional data channel; a standalone variant binds to the on-device Rokid AI service via Android AIDL |
| License | Bimodal: the native Glasses/Phone SDKs ship as AARs with no public source repo, though the POMs published on Rokid's own Maven declare Apache-2.0 and sources jars sit next to the binaries: glass3.open.sdk ships a partial one (the GlassSdk facade, service client and camera helper — 13 files against 282 classes in the AAR), phone.sdk is an umbrella whose real modules phone.sdk.server and phone.sdk.api ship complete sources, and the com.rokid.cxr artifacts ship none — whereas the AIUI app tooling — CLI, samples, agent skills — and the underlying JSAR runtime are open source (jsar-project/AIUI, Apache-2.0) |
| Maturity | Shipping/GA product with actively evolving 2.x SDKs (glass3.open.sdk 2.2.0-E) |
| Who can build | No account at all for the SDKs — nothing is 'unlocked', because nothing is locked. The Quick Start (English and Chinese) publishes the repo https://maven.rokid.com/repository/maven-public/ with no credentials {} block, and com.rokid.security:glass3.open.sdk:2.2.0-E, com.rokid.security:phone.sdk:2.2.0-E and com.rokid.cxr:client-m:1.0.8 all resolve anonymously (fetched with no token 2026-08-24; the glasses AAR is a real 340 KB artifact carrying classes.jar). Neither Quick Start mentions registration, and the Chinese one contains no 实名认证, 注册 or 开通 step. The AIUI tooling is equally open — public GitHub repo plus @yodaos-pkg/create-aiui-agent on npm. An Open Platform account exists for the agent console and forum (Rokid cites 30k+ registered developers), but it gates neither SDK. The one real gate is the cloud OpenAPI, and it is stricter than self-serve: Rokid's ApiKey page requires you to 开通企业账号 — activate an enterprise account by contacting sales/business for OA approval — so the BYO-model agent and chat-log APIs are enterprise-gated. Docs are English + Chinese |
| Not the right SDK | A separate, older Unity UXR SDK exists but targets the legacy Dock/phone-tethered line (archived 2021) — not Rokid Glasses |
| Sourced to the community, not Rokid | Rokid's own Open Platform SDK page defines CXR = Client XR SDK and names the CXR-L (phone, via the Rokid AI App), CXR-M (phone, business/contact-sales) and CXR-S (on-glasses) SDKs, and the Maven coordinate com.rokid.cxr:client-m:1.0.8 resolves on Rokid's own repository at maven.rokid.com. Android minSdk 28 is the community mirror buildwithfenna/rokid-docs's figure, not stated on any primary Rokid page — the primary docs cite Android 8.0+ for the Glass3 SDK and API 31 for bare-metal |
App model
Rokid deliberately exposes multiple dev systems, so where your code runs is a design choice.
| Path | Where your code runs |
|---|---|
| Phone-companion | Your Android/iOS app owns the UX and calls the glasses for camera/mic/display/voice over BLE or Wi-Fi Direct |
| On-glasses native | Kotlin/Java Android apps running on YodaOS-Sprite on the glasses themselves |
| On-glasses AIUI apps | A distinct web-runtime app framework where you write JavaScript + Ink (.ink SFCs), scaffold with the official CLI npm create @yodaos-pkg/aiui-agent, and render UI to the HUD via the JSAR runtime — the Rokid analogue to Meta's Display Web Apps, and publishable without physical hardware (jsar-project/AIUI) |
| Cloud AI agent | Via AIUI — an SSE endpoint your glasses call |
So the platform is not uniformly 'native Android/iOS' — the AIUI/Ink path is an explicitly web-style runtime, and Unity is only the legacy tethered path. Fit with Extentos's phone-companion model: strong on the phone-companion axis — a phone app mediating capture/voice/HUD to the glasses over BLE/Wi-Fi is exactly the companion shape Extentos targets, so a phone-side integration is the natural mapping. The on-glasses native, AIUI/JSAR, and cloud-agent paths are Rokid-specific extras with no Extentos analogue.
Distribution
Reaching users is the least-settled part of the platform, and the install landscape is more active-but-fragmented than a single 'community store exists' conveys.
| AIUI apps / agents | On-glasses native binaries | |
|---|---|---|
| First-party store | Yes. Rokid's English AIUI docs describe the full store path end to end — aix pack the agent, upload the .aix on the Rizon platform, submit for review, then it lists in the Rokid Agent Store with VERSION-based hot updates | None. The English SDK docs document no submission or review route for native APKs |
| Review | Rokid checks performance, interaction compliance and security | Not documented in English |
| Tooling | The Open Platform's AIUI agent console (AIUI Studio) offers a design→code→debug→deploy flow that publishes without physical hardware | — |
| The everyday route | Enterprises can instead point agents at their own model endpoint through the Platform OpenAPI, with no store gate | Sideload-to-glasses over several transports: the Hi Rokid companion app (App Store + Google Play) installs local apps from the phone onto the glasses, and sideload also spans Bluetooth SPP, Wi-Fi LAN, and USB, including browser-based WebUSB installation where a catalog page (e.g. the EUNG SOFT catalog) flashes an app onto the glasses directly from the web |
| Community channels | — | Multiple community stores exist (RokidBrew plus the store referenced by awesome-rokid) |
Public publishing / content review: partial — first-party and documented for AIUI apps/agents, but undocumented in English for on-glasses native binaries, where sideload and self-hosted agents remain the reliable routes. No MDM-specific path is documented publicly.
Capabilities, limits & AI
| Capability | Third-party access |
|---|---|
| Camera | 12MP photo, video, and frame/media capture exposed through the Glasses SDK's camera-and-media module (fixed-focus, 3°-inward tilt; gated behind SDK connection/permissions). |
| Microphone/audio capture | 4 directional mics with ASR; audio output/TTS via the 2 speakers, all first-class SDK capabilities (the voice/AI module covers ASR, TTS, chat). |
| Recognition/CV | The Glasses SDK ships a dedicated recognition module with packaged face detection and vehicle license-plate recognition as SDK-exposed primitives — notable for an in-class device (the module set is media, voice/AI, recognition, messaging/files, device-state, Bluetooth/ring, and P2P). |
| On-lens display/UI | Yes — a monochrome-green Micro-LED waveguide HUD for glanceable text/overlays; you render either by running an on-glasses app (native or an AIUI/Ink JSAR app) or by pushing messages/notifications from the phone. It is a low-FOV glanceable HUD, not a rich spatial-AR canvas. |
| Sensors/input | Temple touchpad, buttons, head gestures, voice, and an optional smart ring accessory (the SDK enumerates Bluetooth smart-ring connectivity); IMU is a documented public API on the AIUI side — Accelerometer, Gyroscope and AbsoluteOrientationSensor in W3C Generic-Sensor shape, with a configurable sampling frequency — and location typically comes from the phone. |
| Reserved surfaces | The 'Hi Rokid' wake phrase/trigger and the default assistant ship first-party, but third parties are not shut out of voice triggering: the Glasses SDK's IOfflineCmdService (GlassSdk.getGlassOfflineCmdService()) lets an app register its own offline wake phrases in Chinese or English, each with its own onVoiceTriggered() callback, running on-device with no network. Reserving the wake word is a separate axis from extending what the assistant can do, though: per Rokid's SDK changelog, Glasses SDK 2.1.9-E (May 2026) added GlassSdk.registerLeqiInterceptor(), a first-party hook where a foreground app implements LeqiInterceptor.onLeqiInstruction() and returns true to consume a built-in-assistant voice command or false to pass it through — superseding the older community workaround of scraping assistant responses/notifications via the Android Accessibility Service. |
| AI & the assistant | Unusually open at the model layer even though the wake trigger stays reserved. Via AIUI and the Customizable Agent feature (announced Feb 2026), developers can bring their own model — privately-deployed DeepSeek R1, Qwen3, Kimi K2.5, etc. — by registering on the Open Platform and configuring an agent URL + auth key; the glasses call it over SSE, with support for tool/agent frameworks (OpenClaw) doing browser/file/Python actions. Voice invocation drives it; on-device compute (the NXP RT600) handles wake/low-power voice while heavier inference is cloud or phone. Net: third-party AI is a supported, first-class path, which is rare in this class. |
Roadmap
- Recent: Rokid Glasses launched Aug 27 2025 (NYC event + Kickstarter that topped $400–500k in hours) and are now shipping globally at $699 (list $799); the Glasses/Phone SDKs and the AIUI app tooling are live on the Open Platform.
- Feb 11 2026: the 'Customizable Agent' bring-your-own-model feature (DeepSeek/Qwen/Kimi via SSE, unreviewed private deployment) was announced — the platform's most notable openness move. The display-less AI Glasses Style ($349) expanded the lineup in 2026.
- Shipped since: the Rokid Agent Store for AIUI agents, surfaced internationally in the Hi Rokid app from v1.10.0.
- Announced-but-maturing: a first-party app store / public publishing pipeline for on-glasses native binaries (referenced by Rokid but not yet documented in English).
- Momentum: high — a large existing CN developer base (Rokid cites 30k+ registered developers), an active global developer push, an open-source AIUI/JSAR app runtime, and frequent SDK iteration; the main gap for outside developers is a clear public distribution/store story for native apps.
In the landscape
Rokid is one platform in the third-party smart-glasses landscape. See how open it is relative to other platforms, how AI works across them, and the full platform comparison.
Related
The third-party smart-glasses landscape
Can you build third-party apps for smart glasses today? A platform-by-platform comparison — Meta, Snap Spectacles, Brilliant Labs, Rokid, RayNeo, Even Realities, Vuzix, Android XR, Apple and more: which have an official SDK, how apps are built and distributed, and whether you can publish publicly.
How open is smart-glasses development?
A mental model for the openness spectrum in smart-glasses development — SDK availability, license, build-time gating, and publishing gating — with today's platforms placed on it.
AI on smart glasses
How third-party AI works across smart-glasses platforms — which first-party assistants are reserved (Meta AI, Gemini, Ari), where you bring your own AI (phone-side, cloud, on-device), wake-word limits, and the voice-in → AI → voice-out surface that generalizes even where the assistant is closed.
How third-party smart-glasses apps are distributed
Smart glasses don't have one app store. The app-model taxonomy — companion mobile app vs. an app that runs on the glasses (native or web) — and why a single platform (Meta) offers two entirely separate developer systems: DAT and Ray-Ban Display Web Apps.
Meta smart glasses (Meta DAT)
Meta smart glasses developer guide: Wearables Device Access Toolkit (DAT 0.8.0) capabilities, supported models (Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, Ray-Ban Display), 2026 distribution state, and how Extentos abstracts the toolkit.
Capabilities
The Extentos capability vocabulary — the vendor-agnostic SDK primitives (audio, camera, voice, assistant, display, hardware events) your handler subscribes to.
Brilliant Labs
Brilliant Labs for third-party developers — SDK access, app model, distribution, capabilities & AI, and where it sits in the 2026 smart-glasses landscape.
RayNeo (TCL)
RayNeo (TCL) for third-party developers — SDK access, app model, distribution, capabilities & AI, and where it sits in the 2026 smart-glasses landscape.