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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why they would use something like QNX and have more work ahead of them in integration vs. just put iOS on it like they did with an apple TV. The cost is low enough to make it practical.

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Many of the same manufacturers supporting CarPlay have already committed to Android support as well (http://www.openautoalliance.net/#press). I would imagine that Apple building on top of QNX allows for the car manufacturers to standardize on a single hardware platform across all mobile integrations.

I doubt that Apple could announce so many automotive partners if the system was completely Apple proprietary, due to both time and flexibility.

QNX is already used in a lot of in-car infotainment systems and the auto manufacturers have plenty of experience with it. It's also better optimized for this sort of environment. For example an iPhone can take up to a minute to start up, but QNX can boot almost instantly. It's not just a case of slapping iOS into a car, job done. The environment, required performance characteristics, device drivers needed to integrate with the rest of the car's systems, etc, etc are a whole different world. It's not that Apple couldn't do it, it's just that there are existing systems that do exactly what's needed.

Also interesting to note is that Tizen has a presence for infotainment systems with car manufacturers also.

https://01.org/solutions/why-tizen-for-ivi

I wonder if they're looking to reduce the hardware footprint required. If QNX is lighter than iOS, they might be able to save a few dollars per unit. If they can get away with a 40Mhz processor rather than a 1Ghz processor, that's a pretty good cost savings. iOS might have more features than they really need, like running Windows CE rather than Windows XP for embedded stuff.

Another possibility I can think of is that they want deeper integration into the car, and QNX may already be running on that car. Adding Siri on top of an existing platform might actually be less work than getting iOS to talk to QNX in a way that Apple is satisfied with.

The car systems are probably all running QNX, you cannot just switch them to iOS which cannot deal with the hardware.

is it more work? The CarPlay seems to run on the iPhone and projects to the QNX system. So the car system is just a dumb interface. Update iOS, and you update Carplay. Seems like less work.

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