QNX: A pivot for BlackBerry helping revive its lost glory

John Wall has spent almost his entire career at the same company, yet when he tells people he works at QNX, he usually gets blank stares.

“If I tell them I work at QNX,” he said, “they don’t know what that means.”

When he explains that QNX is owned by BlackBerry, the reaction is far more familiar: BlackBerry still exists?

It does—but not as a phone maker.

The company once known as Research In Motion left the smartphone business roughly a decade ago. The era of physical keyboards and games like Brick Breaker feels far more distant than that.

Yet BlackBerry remains deeply embedded in everyday life, mostly in places people never notice.

Today, the most valuable business of the company is software, not hardware. QNX technology quietly runs inside roughly 275 million vehicles worldwide. In fact, BlackBerry software powers far more products than most people realize.

In modern vehicles, QNX software forms the invisible layer supporting critical safety features such as collision alerts, blind-spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, and lane-keeping assistance.

“We’re the foundation,” Wall said. “Everything pretty on top wouldn’t work without a strong foundation.”

That foundation has become increasingly valuable as cars evolve into rolling computers. Major automakers rely on QNX because its real-time operating system is built for reliability and failure is not an option.

Its reputation for dependability has also taken it beyond the auto industry. QNX software now supports factory automation, robotics, and medical equipment, including surgical robots and hospital devices where precision can be life-critical.

Ironically, QNX has also become the business that helped revive BlackBerry itself.

Once a minor division, QNX now generates about half of BlackBerry’s revenue. The company has posted four consecutive profitable quarters, something it had not achieved since the days when BlackBerry phones competed with the iPhone.

Following a strong earnings report last month, BlackBerry shares climbed about 50%. The stock remains far below its peak, but after years of decline, executives are pitching a different narrative: BlackBerry is growing again.

The story began in 2010, when BlackBerry acquired QNX to power its next generation of smartphones. By then, however, BlackBerry’s mobile decline was already underway.

QNX was founded in 1980, and Wall joined the Canadian software company shortly after graduating in the early 1990s. When BlackBerry acquired QNX, many engineers were moved to help build a mobile operating system. Wall stayed with the original QNX team. While others focused on smartphones, his group kept working on automotive software and kept their QNX email addresses.

“Nobody paid attention to us,” Wall said.

That freedom helped QNX establish a strong foothold in car infotainment systems, until major Silicon Valley rivals entered the market.

Google launched its Android automotive platform, and Apple began hiring QNX engineers for its own car ambitions. Once again, BlackBerry seemed at risk of being outmatched.

Then, in 2014, Wall traveled to Silicon Valley to meet one of QNX’s key customers - Audi.

Audi’s engineering chief explained that the company planned to adopt Google for infotainment. But that did not mean QNX was out.

The future of cars, he said, would depend even more on dependable safety systems.

That conversation changed everything.

Instead of fighting tech giants for the dashboard screen, Wall decided QNX would focus on the deeper software layers underneath.

“The circumstances that led to us losing infotainment pivoted the company in the right direction,” Wall said, “whether or not we knew it at the time.”

At the time, though, it felt less like strategy and more like necessity.

“There was no alternative,” he said. “We had to take what we had and figure out: Where do we go now?”

That decision ultimately carried QNX into other industries as well, medical devices, industrial automation, and robotics. But even as its reach expanded, its visibility did not.

And most people still have no idea that the invisible software making those systems work is built by BlackBerry.

BlackBerry’s revival is not a consumer comeback but a strategic reinvention around invisible, high-value infrastructure. Through QNX, BlackBerry has moved away from the smartphone market into software that powers safety-critical systems in cars, medical devices, and industrial automation, markets where reliability matters more than brand recognition and where switching costs are high once the technology is integrated. Ironically, losing the infotainment battle to companies like Google and Apple pushed BlackBerry deeper into the software stack, where it now occupies a more defensible position as vehicles become increasingly software-defined. This highlights a broader industry shift, the most durable value may not come from consumer-facing products but from the unseen operating systems that quietly run critical real-world machines.