Three weeks ago Unitree quietly opened UniStore, a marketplace where third-party developers publish, price and sell skills — pre-packaged moves, gestures, dances and routines that a Unitree robot can download and perform on demand. We called it the smartest move of the company's year. Since then the catalogue has filled up fast, so we went back, scrolled the whole thing, and pulled out the five skills that best explain what this store actually is.
One honest disclaimer before we start, because it matters for everything that follows. Right now, almost every skill on UniStore is a dance, a kung-fu form, a celebratory gesture or an acrobatic stunt. These are party tricks, not chores. Hold that thought — by the end of this piece I want to convince you that the gap between "robot does a backflip" and "robot does your job" is far smaller than it looks.
First: why UniStore is a genuine revolution
Strip away the dance moves and UniStore is a developer marketplace bolted onto a robot — the exact playbook Apple and Google used to turn a phone into a platform. A developer uploads a skill, it passes Unitree's safety review, it appears in the store priced by its author, and a buyer downloads it from the same app they use to control their robot. Unitree takes a cut; the developer keeps the rest.
The reason that's a revolution and not just a feature: for the first time, a hardware company has admitted out loud that it cannot and should not write all the software itself — and built a market so it doesn't have to. Every animator, choreographer and reinforcement-learning hobbyist on Earth is now a potential supplier for Unitree's robots. That is a structurally different company from one shipping a fixed menu of factory behaviours.
A robot used to be worth the sum of its motors. After UniStore, a robot is worth the catalogue of things it can do — and the rate at which that catalogue grows.
The 5 best UniStore skills right now
A note on how we ranked these. We are not simply listing the five biggest download counts (though we cite the real numbers, and the chart-topper does lead). We picked the five that, between them, map the full range of what the store has become — entertainment, celebrity, heritage, engineering and pure fan culture. Every one of them runs today on the Unitree G1.
Skill #1 · The People's Champion
Funky Wiggle Dance
A quirky in-place body wiggle: fluid hip rotation, rhythmic arm swings, playful and a little ridiculous. It is the single most downloaded skill on UniStore, and it earns that spot for the same reason Fortnite's silliest emotes outsold its most elaborate ones — it is instantly shareable and it gives the machine a personality. A €4,000 humanoid doing the Funky Wiggle stops feeling like an appliance and starts feeling like a roommate with a sense of humour. Low stakes, high virality, irresistible on camera. This is the skill that sells the next robot.
Skill #2 · The Licensing Bombshell
Michael Jackson Tribute
A choreographed excerpt of Michael Jackson's signature moves — the moonwalk-and-lean vocabulary that every human dancer has tried and failed to copy. As a skill it is genuinely fun. As a signal it is the most important entry on this list, because it points straight at the licensing economy waiting around the corner. Today this is an unofficial homage. Tomorrow, estates, studios and choreographers will license official routines the way game studios license skins — verified, paid, exclusive. The moment a celebrity's actual moves become a purchasable robot skill, UniStore stops being a toy box and becomes an IP marketplace.
Skill #3 · The Cultural Archive
Long Fist (Changquan)
Changquan — "Long Fist" — is a traditional northern Chinese martial-arts form built on long, extended postures and sweeping, fully-committed strikes. Performed in place by a G1, it is mesmerising, and it is the most downloaded martial-arts skill in the store. But the deeper point is preservation: a form that for centuries lived only in a master's body, passed hand to hand, has now been captured once and made performable forever, by any robot, anywhere. UniStore is quietly becoming an archive of human movement — and that is a use case nobody put on the launch slides.
Skill #4 · The Athlete
Webster Front Flip (G1 29-DOF)
The technical Everest of the store. A full 360° Webster front flip — stand, crouch, launch, rotate, land and recover — reaching roughly 1 m of peak height and 1.3 m of forward travel. The download count is lower than the dances precisely because it is hardware-gated: it demands the G1 29-DOF waist edition, two metres of forward clearance, flat firm ground and at least 50% battery. That gating is the story. This skill is the proof that UniStore content is already escaping the "cute moves" category and crossing into athletic feats most humans physically cannot do. When a marketplace can distribute a backflip, it can distribute anything the body can be trained to do.
Skill #5 · The Fan Economy
Kamehameha Stance
The iconic Dragon Ball energy-blast pose — hands cupped at the hip, weight loaded, ready to fire. It is not technically ambitious, and that is exactly why it belongs here. The Kamehameha Stance is the long tail made visible: a cheap, instantly recognisable micro-skill that a single fan could build in an afternoon and still find an audience for. You do not need a motion-capture studio or a robotics PhD to ship it. That is the whole promise of an open marketplace — and it is where the really large numbers eventually come from.
Every manufacturer should open up a slice of the stack
Here is the argument I have been making in print for a while, and UniStore is the first real evidence for it. Hardware is the moat. Building a humanoid that walks, balances and manipulates objects is brutally hard and expensive — that part nobody can copy cheaply. Software is no longer the moat, because the cost of writing it has collapsed. With modern AI coding assistants, a competent developer — or a motivated teenager — can produce in a weekend what used to take a funded team a quarter.
So the manufacturer that clings to every line of code is fighting the wrong war. The smart move is the opposite: open a slice of the stack, publish the interfaces, and let the global developer community pour in. Pair that openness with a paid marketplace and you get the best of both worlds — the community builds far faster than any in-house team could, the genuinely good builders get paid, and the whole platform improves at the speed of the crowd rather than the speed of one company's roadmap. UniStore is not full open source — Unitree still owns the runtime and the safety layer — but it is the most pragmatic step in that direction any major hardware vendor has taken.
This is about to become a global pattern
Do not read this as a Unitree story. Read it as the template every robot maker will be forced to copy. Once buyers learn that a robot's value is its catalogue, "what can it download?" becomes a purchase question — and a humanoid with no store will look as stranded as a smartphone with no apps. Expect Figure, UBTECH, Booster and the rest to launch their own versions within a year or two.
The healthier endgame — and the one I would bet the industry eventually backs into — is a shared, cross-vendor skill format, a USB-C-style standard so a skill bought once runs on any compatible humanoid. We are nowhere near that yet, and the first mover gets to shape what the format looks like. But the direction of travel is clear: a worldwide skills economy, the same way app stores went from one phone to every phone on Earth.
A real, new way to make money
Let's talk cash, because this is the part that turns a hobby into an industry. Every skill on UniStore is priced and downloaded — that is a revenue line. A choreographer in Seoul who spends a weekend recording a clean routine, lists it, and watches a few hundred robots buy it has turned a side project into recurring income. Look back at the numbers above: the Funky Wiggle Dance alone has 279 downloads, and the store is only weeks old against a robot install base that is still tiny.
Multiply that by a growing fleet and a few thousand creators and you have a genuine creator economy — Patreon for robot behaviour. And critically, AI has knocked the barrier to entry to the floor: you no longer need a studio or a research lab to participate. Ordinary people, building with AI tools, can now author and sell skills. That is the door UniStore just propped open, and a lot of developers are going to walk through it.
Today a dance. Tomorrow a job.
Which brings us back to the disclaimer from the top. Yes, today these skills are dances, forms and stunts. But the marketplace does not care what the motion means — the exact same rails that distribute a Charleston will distribute folding a shirt, plating a dish, restocking a shelf, or helping someone up after a fall. The hard part was never the catalogue; it was the underlying motion models, and those are improving monthly. The Webster front flip is the canary: skills are already jumping from "cute" to "athletic feat."
When that crossover finishes, UniStore stops being an entertainment store and becomes something far bigger — a labour marketplace for the physical world, where a useful task built once can be sold to every robot that needs it. That is the quantitative leap. The distance from a kung-fu form to a paid, genuinely useful chore is smaller than the spectacle of the dances makes it look — and the company that built the rails to sell the dances will already own the rails to sell the work.
That is why a list of party tricks is worth taking seriously. The skills are the entertainment phase. The store is the revolution. Big bets, big potential rewards — and exactly the right move for Unitree to be making right now.