On 13 December 2025, the Chinese manufacturer Unitree announced the launch of what it describes as the world’s first app store for humanoid robots, according to the specialist site Interesting Engineering. The image is easy to grasp: rather like the App Store on your phone, where you download games and apps, here you could kit your robot out with new abilities at the tap of a button.
It’s a tempting pitch, and that is doubtless why it was chosen. But once you look at what the platform – dubbed the Unitree Robotics Developer Platform (Unitree’s “developer platform”) – actually does, the picture changes entirely. This is not an app store. It’s something else, and it’s worth understanding what.
What they put in the shop window: a robot that dances
To make the thing likeable, the display leans hard on the spectacle. According to Interesting Engineering, the platform offers pre-loaded action routines: martial-arts moves, a dance called “The Twist”, and even ballet sequences. Enough to set your humanoid moving the way you’d hit play on a video.
It’s pretty, it’s shareable, and it soaks up most of the conversation. The trouble is that the dancing isn’t the heart of the product. It’s the shop front.
First real function: you’re the one driving the robot
The platform’s first genuinely central capability is a good deal less glamorous. According to the same source, the tool lets you control the robot remotely from a smartphone, using the phone’s camera to guide its movements. In other words: you film, and the robot copies.
The technical term for this is teleoperation – a human piloting the machine remotely, live. This is no small detail. It means that, in many cases, it isn’t the robot “deciding” for itself what to do: it’s a person, behind a screen, holding its hand through every move. The fine autonomy you imagine while watching a humanoid walk is, here, partly supplied by you.
You can present this as a handy feature. You can also read it as a confession: if you need a human and a phone camera to make the robot move properly, then the machine can’t yet manage on its own.
Second real function: harvesting data
The second capability is more telling still. Again according to Interesting Engineering, the platform lets users download, share and adapt training datasets – what are known as datasets, that is, large collections of examples used to teach an artificial intelligence something.
Why does this matter? Because it’s exactly the fuel a robot needs to improve. Every time a user drives their machine by hand, they produce – without necessarily thinking about it – examples of successful movements: how to grasp an object, how to get around, how to react. Stitched together, these human demonstrations become a precious raw material for training the next generation of robots to do without… humans.
Link the two functions together and the picture sharpens. Teleoperation puts people to work. The dataset-sharing reaps the fruit of that work. The “dance” and the “app store”, meanwhile, draw the crowds onto the platform.
Why the label matters
Calling this an “app store” borrows from the reassuring world of the smartphone an image of entertainment and free choice. But a conventional app store sells you tools that you consume. Here, two of the headline functions are mostly about getting you to produce something: your driving, and the data that flows from it.
This raises some very concrete questions, which our newsroom’s brief leaves open and which it is fairer to ask than to answer on Unitree’s behalf: who, exactly, owns the datasets shared on the platform? What are they then reused for? And is a service whose two main uses are teleoperating a robot and gathering data really a product designed for the general public, or a machine for harvesting training material dressed up as a gadget?
It’s worth noting that, at this stage, this information comes from a single secondary source, the outlet Interesting Engineering; it should therefore be taken with the usual caution until Unitree has publicly spelled out how its platform works. But the mechanism described is clear: behind the word “apps”, there are mainly humans doing the driving, and data piling up. The rest is just dancing.