YodaOS

YodaOS
Information
Type	Operating system
Subtype	Smart glasses operating system
Creator	Rokid
Developer	Rokid
Operating System	YodaOS-Master: based on the Android Open Source Project; 2019 open-source release: Linux built with OpenWrt
Devices	Rokid Glasses (AI-native YodaOS); Rokid Station 2 with Rokid Max 2, sold as Rokid AR Lite and Rokid AR Spatial (YodaOS-Master)
Release Date	Open-source code published January 2019; YodaOS-Master announced April 23, 2024; AI-native YodaOS announced June 26, 2026
Website	https://www.rokid.com/en-US/yodaos

YodaOS is a family of operating systems developed by the Chinese company Rokid for its voice assistants, augmented reality display glasses and AI smart glasses. The name has been used for three distinct generations: an open-source Linux distribution for voice-controlled devices that Rokid published on GitHub in early 2019, YodaOS-Master, a spatial operating system based on the Android Open Source Project that runs on Rokid's Station 2 compute unit, and an AI-native operating system for smart glasses that Rokid announced at its Open Day 2026 developer conference in Hangzhou on June 26, 2026.

Rokid describes the 2026 system as the world's first AI-native operating system for smart glasses. It is built around voice and other on-glasses interaction so that users rely less on a smartphone, and it organizes third-party functions as AI agents distributed through the Rokid Agent Store rather than as conventional apps. YodaOS underlies Rokid's display-equipped AI glasses, sold in Japan as Rokid Smart AI Glasses.

Reviewed 29 September 2026. Every claim checked against its cited source (TMTPost, ShenzhenWare, Yicai, Mogura VR, GameSpace, EqualOcean, GitHub, Rokid pages and press releases, China Daily, Tom's Guide, How-To Geek, Pickr, Auganix), including dates, figures, names and quotes. About review dates.

History

Open-source voice operating system (2018-2019)

Rokid's first products were voice interaction devices, the Rokid Alien (February 2016) and Rokid Pebble (May 2017); it released the Rokid Glass 1 AR glasses in June 2018. In early 2019 the company released the source code of YodaOS on GitHub. EqualOcean reported on February 1, 2019 that the system was built on the Linux kernel, with a hardware abstraction layer, an AI layer and a JavaScript application framework on top, and that it integrated Rokid's FCTC cloud voice algorithm so that voice interaction behaved the same on the device and in the cloud. Rokid claimed that the system raised the activation success rate of voice products by 20% in strong noise and woke in less than 300 ms, and said it could be adapted to mainstream chips from Qualcomm, Jingchen, Samsung, MediaTek and Broadcom. Rokid's corporate timeline lists January 2019 as the month it "Released the YodaOS-XR, operating system".

The public repository, yodaos-project/yodaos, describes the system as "Yet another Linux distribution for voice-enabled IoT" that uses JavaScript as its application language. It is licensed under Apache 2.0, is built with OpenWrt, bundles ShadowNode, a Node.js runtime designed for memory-limited devices, and provides board configurations for the Raspberry Pi 3B+ and Kamino18. The project's documentation calls it "the first fully open source voice interactive operating system" and lists Rokid's Turen voice wake-up module, cloud speech recognition, speech synthesis and media playback among its components. The repository was created on December 13, 2018, and its most recent commits date from December 2019.

YodaOS-Master for AR glasses (from 2024)

Rokid introduced YodaOS-Master when it announced the Rokid AR Lite on April 23, 2024. The AR Lite pairs Rokid Max 2 display glasses with the Rokid Station 2, a handheld host unit that runs the new "spatial operating system". Rokid said the Station 2's Qualcomm Snapdragon platform had been optimized for graphics rendering and AI computing on YodaOS-Master, and that the joint work with Qualcomm gave longer battery life, better thermal management and better gaming performance. A May 24, 2024 release for the Kickstarter launch named the chip as the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and said YodaOS-Master built on Rokid's previous-generation product, the Rokid AR Joy, a portable entertainment platform that used YodaOS-C.

Rokid also sells the Max 2 and Station 2 together as Rokid AR Spatial; its store describes YodaOS-Master as a "spatial browser". In an August 2026 announcement, Rokid described YodaOS as its "spatial computing operating system built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)" and said it powers the Rokid Max 2.

AI-native YodaOS for smart glasses (2026)

Rokid's founder and CEO Zhu Mingming (Misa Zhu) launched the AI-native YodaOS at the Open Day 2026 global ecosystem and developer conference, held on June 26, 2026, at the Academic Exchange Center in Hangzhou's Future Sci-Tech City. Rokid also announced AI Assistant 2.0, the AIUI graphics framework, a smart helmet for motorcycle and electric bike riders that works with Rokid Glasses, and a new AR spatial computing device at the event. Rokid vice president Wang Junjie (Jackson), head of the company's XR center, presented the system's architecture.

Speaking to Yicai after the event, Zhu compared the smart glasses industry to "the BlackBerry era before the first iPhone" and argued that the next phase of competition would be decided by software and ecosystems rather than hardware. He argued that AI assistants chaining phone apps together were the last holdout of the graphical user interface era, and that an AI-native system should let users reach services directly through AI without going through a traditional app.

Rokid also presented YodaOS in Japan at a press conference for the general retail launch of Rokid Smart AI Glasses, which went on sale there on July 10, 2026. YodaOS had its global exhibition debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC 2026), held July 17-20, 2026. On September 9, 2026, at IFA Berlin, Rokid launched AIUI Studio worldwide, a browser-based tool for building agents for its AI glasses.

Features

YodaOS-Master

Rokid's product page presents YodaOS-Master as an AR spatial interaction operating system with five real-time spatial computing functions: spatial positioning, spatial rendering, spatial display, spatial interaction and spatial audio. The same page lists micro-gesture control, keyboard and mouse input, a controller ray pointer using the Station Pro, combined head and hand interaction, and voice commands, with content grouped into games, video, office productivity and digital culture. A September 2025 Rokid article describes the system as built on SLAM, gesture recognition and spatial audio, with plane detection for surfaces such as tables and walls, and says that "typically, all Android apps" run on it.

On the AR Lite, Rokid said YodaOS-Master supports 3DoF head tracking and several applications at once, each on its own floating screen. It claimed this was the first time the AR industry had done this at the system level. The announcement also listed a multi-screen mode equivalent to a screen of up to 300 inches, a motion mode with picture stabilization for travel, 32:9 ultra-wide screen casting, and single, double and triple finger touch controls on the Station 2 in place of physical buttons.

AI-native YodaOS

At Open Day 2026, Zhu said an AI-native operating system for glasses needs three properties: always on, quick in and out, and rich content. Wang described YodaOS as a four-layer architecture:

Layer	What Rokid said it does
Rapid interaction interface	Two-character wake word with a response time of 0.2 seconds
Multi-dimensional perception layer	Two chips running two independent systems, with computing split between the device, edge and cloud, for continuous sensing without shortening battery life
Intelligent capability layer	Combines user memory, a knowledge graph and skill tools as context for the assistant
Scenario layer	Ongoing feature delivery; Rokid said its glasses had received 20 over-the-air updates adding a cumulative 500 features since the product went on sale in September of the previous year

AI Assistant 2.0 added proactive functions, such as automatic itinerary logging and scheduled reminders. AIUI, Rokid's own graphics framework, uses the glasses' display for graphical output in place of text-only replies, and Rokid calls YodaOS the first AI operating system to support it. Rokid says the system opens hardware capabilities, AI infrastructure and development tools to developers through its open platform.

Mogura VR, reporting on the July 2026 Japanese launch, wrote that glasses are better operated through a combination of taps, eye movements and body movements than through voice commands or a phone app alone, and that YodaOS is meant to connect language models, memory systems, the display, applications, external services and real-world information. Zhao Weiqi, Rokid's head of open global ecosystem, said AI "needs to be deeply integrated into the hardware, OS, interaction, and user experience". Rokid's devices let users switch between ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud's Qwen instead of being tied to one model.

Rokid said at the launch that it had integrated services from Alipay and WeChat and described its glasses as the first AI glasses to support both payment systems. Services named at the event included Alipay phone top-ups, city tours, bike-sharing unlocks and parking payment, WeChat code scanning (starting with payments), taxi booking through Amap and medicine purchasing through JD.com. For privacy, Zhu said the camera cannot be used if its indicator light is covered or cut, that data is encrypted along the whole chain, and that a lost device is forced to erase its data if a stranger pairs it.

Developer ecosystem

Third-party functions for the AI glasses are published as agents in the Rokid Agent Store. At Open Day 2026, Rokid vice president and head of ecosystem Cai Guoxiang (Gary Cai) said the store had been open for six months. He said the overseas agent development platform was already live and that the overseas agent store would open on July 10, 2026. Cai said the platform was integrated with WeChat, Douyin, Alipay, JD.com, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. In August 2026 GameSpace reported that the store had launched in the United States through the Hi Rokid app for iOS and Android, with agents for real-time translation, transcription, navigation and object recognition.

Date	Agents in store	Developers	Source
June 26, 2026	More than 440, with more than 5,000 in development	More than 35,000 registered, more than 10,000 certified	Rokid at Open Day 2026
August 2026	More than 400, from more than 3,000 submitted workflows	More than 33,000 registered	GameSpace
August 2026	Not stated	About 33,000 registered, about half from China	China Daily
September 9, 2026	More than 500	More than 35,000 registered	Rokid at IFA Berlin 2026

Rokid also runs the Spatial Joy developer competition. By June 2026 it had held four editions with more than 2,000 individual and team entrants from 14 countries, 168 winning projects and more than 6 million yuan in prize money. Zhu told Yicai that the platform needs an installed base of more than two million consumer devices before it can sustainably support independent developers. At that point Rokid plans a token-based revenue-sharing model in which the AI inference costs of user interactions are billed in tokens and shared with developers.

AIUI Studio, launched globally in September 2026, runs in a web browser and covers design through publishing. It includes hardware simulation, so developers can test agents without owning the glasses, and it can build an app from a plain-language description. Rokid says its AIUI Skills Library framework and AIUI Code assistance help developers reduce latency, memory use and power consumption.

Supported devices

Version	Device	Notes
YodaOS (2019 open-source release)	Voice-enabled IoT devices; board configurations for Raspberry Pi 3B+ and Rokid Kamino18	Apache 2.0 Linux distribution
YodaOS-C	Rokid AR Joy	Portable entertainment platform; Rokid's previous generation before the AR Lite
YodaOS-Master	Rokid Station 2 with Rokid Max 2 (Rokid AR Lite)	Announced April 23, 2024; Kickstarter launch May 24, 2024 at US$749, or US$499 for early backers
YodaOS-Master	Rokid AR Spatial (Max 2 and Station 2)	Station 2 with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, per How-To Geek
YodaOS (AI-native)	Rokid Glasses (Rokid Smart AI Glasses in Japan)	Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB storage; Japanese retail launch July 10, 2026

Reception

Reviews published about a year apart reported different access to Google services on YodaOS-Master. In a November 2024 review of the Rokid AR Lite, Tom's Guide's Jason England called YodaOS "a version of AOSP". He reported no slowdown when multitasking on the Station 2, but criticized the lack of Google Play services: users had to rely on Rokid's own app store, an unofficial store and APK websites for many common apps. In an August 2025 review of the Rokid AR Spatial, How-To Geek called YodaOS-Master "a mostly Android app-compatible operating system" and reported that users could sign in to the Google Play Store and Google Chrome from the home screen. The reviewer found text entry slow and the Rokid mobile app "quite buggy and difficult to use". Pickr's July 2026 review of the Rokid Glasses described their software as "a Linux-based operating system largely built for wearables called 'YodaOS'".

See also

• Rokid
• Rokid Glasses
• Rokid AR Lite
• Android XR
• Snap OS
• Meta Horizon OS
• AI Glasses