Unitree Robotics unveiled the world’s first app store designed specifically for humanoid robots. Through the app store, humanoid robots can be customised just like the apps on a smartphone. The announcement came through videos shared on social media platforms – YouTube, X and China’s RedNote platform.
In them, the Hangzhou-based company showed how users can access and expand a robot’s capabilities directly from a mobile phone, shifting control away from lab environments and into everyday devices.
At the center of the launch is the Unitree Robotics Developer Platform, which the company described as a shared workspace for software tools, datasets, and remote-control functions. The idea is simple: make embodied intelligence easier to experiment with, not just for engineers, but for anyone curious enough to try.The interface runs on a smartphone and turns the device into a remote controller. Using a phone camera, users can guide a humanoid robot’s movements or trigger preloaded routines.
In the demo videos, robots perform a martial arts sequence inspired by Bruce Lee, break into the 1960s dance move “The Twist,” and execute carefully timed ballet steps. The scenes are playful, but they underline a serious point about accessibility.
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What sets the platform apart is its emphasis on sharing. Users can upload training datasets and action sequences, download those created by others, and adapt them for their own robots. Once added, these skills can be reused across multiple machines, allowing new behaviors to spread quickly without starting from scratch each time.
Unitree is actively inviting outside participation, encouraging users to “develop and share together.” The approach echoes how mobile app ecosystems grew, with third-party developers shaping how devices are used in the real world. Applied to humanoid robots, that model could cut the gap between research demos and practical deployment.
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The launch also adds to Unitree’s growing profile in China’s robotics push. The company, often grouped among Hangzhou’s so-called “Six Little Dragons,” first built its reputation with quadruped robots before turning its focus to humanoid machines. This latest move suggests it sees software openness, not just hardware advances, as the next lever for scale.
For now, the app store is a controlled ecosystem. But if it gains traction, it could change how people think about robots: less as fixed-purpose machines, and more as platforms that evolve through use, updates, and shared ideas.
