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TL;DR: BlackBerry QNX is a secure, real-time operating system designed for mission-critical embedded systems. It powers over 275 million vehicles worldwide, along industrial automation, robotics, rail systems, aerospace systems, and medical devices.
I still get emails from readers asking whatever happened to BlackBerry. Fair question. If your last memory of the brand is a physical keyboard and a trackball, it’s easy to assume the company folded years ago along with the phones. It didn’t. BlackBerry is still very much alive, and there’s a good chance you’re sitting inside one of its products right now, even if you’ve never owned a BlackBerry phone.
The Phones Really Did Go Away
Let me be upfront about this part, because I don’t want to overstate the comeback. BlackBerry the phone maker is gone. The company outsourced its smartphone production to TCL in 2016, and that partnership ended in 2020 after the BlackBerry KEY2 LE. A startup called OnwardMobility tried to bring a 5G BlackBerry phone to market after that, but it never shipped, and OnwardMobility shut down in 2022.
On January 4, 2022, BlackBerry formally ended support for the classic BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 devices, meaning even the last holdout phones stopped receiving service that day. I still have a BlackBerry Passport and though it powers on, its days of service are over. It is now a museum piece.
So if you’re waiting for a new physical keyboard phone with the BlackBerry name on it, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That chapter is properly closednand you can move on.
But the Company Pivoted, and It Pivoted Hard
But there is something a lot of people miss. BlackBerry Limited, the company, didn’t need the phone business to survive. Back in 2010, well before the phones started struggling, BlackBerry acquired a company called QNX Software Systems. QNX makes a real-time operating system, the kind of software built to respond instantly and reliably when it absolutely has to, whether that’s a second or two before a crash or the moment a sensor detects something on the road ahead.
That acquisition turned out to be one of the smartest long-term bets in the company’s history. While the phone division was fighting a losing battle against Android and iOS, QNX was quietly becoming the operating backbone for car safety systems worldwide.
Just How Big Is QNX in Cars Today
The numbers here genuinely amazing. QNX was running in 175 million vehicles back in 2020. By October 2024, that number had climbed to more than 255 million. As of 2026, Counterpoint Research has confirmed QNX software is now embedded in more than 275 million vehicles worldwide, an increase of 100 million since 2020.
Carmakers Using QNX
Automakers using QNX include names you’d recognize immediately: BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo, Hyundai, and Bosch, among many others. Inside these vehicles, QNX handles the digital instrument cluster, the infotainment screen, advanced driver assistance features like lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, and increasingly the domain controllers that manage how different vehicle systems talk to each other.
The financial picture backs this up. In BlackBerry’s fiscal 2026 results, QNX brought in $268 million in revenue, close to half the company’s total revenue for the year. In the most recent quarter reported, QNX revenue climbed to over 50 percent of BlackBerry’s total revenue, up from the prior year. QNX isn’t a side project anymore. It’s the main business.
The Rebrand Says Everything
If you needed one more sign that BlackBerry is betting its future on this, look at what happened in January 2025. The company had been calling this division “BlackBerry IoT.” It rebranded that unit back to simply “QNX,” dropping the BlackBerry name from the front of the business entirely. That’s not a company running from its history. That’s a company that decided decades of trust built with automakers under the QNX name mattered more than keeping the BlackBerry label visible on the product.
The brand that once defined mobile computing for an entire generation of professionals didn’t vanish. It just moved to a place most people never think to look, deep inside the electronics of the car they drive every day. BlackBerry is now defining automotive computing.
Why This Matters If You Grew Up on BlackBerry
I get why this story means something to longtime BlackBerry users. There’s a real sense of vindication in knowing the engineering culture that built devices known for security and reliability didn’t disappear, it just found a new application where those same qualities are non-negotiable. A dropped BBM message was annoying. A delayed response from a car’s collision detection system is not something anyone can afford.
QNX isn’t limited to cars either. The same software shows up in medical devices, industrial controls, robotics, rail systems, and aerospace applications, anywhere a system genuinely cannot afford to lag or crash.
So the next time someone tells you BlackBerry is dead, you can tell them the truth. The phones are gone, but the company that built them is bigger in one sense than it ever was as a phone maker, just working behind the scenes now instead of in your pocket.
Smartphones are far sexier and more personal than cars, but modern smartphones and cars are really close cousins. Both are powered by advanced, smart software. So while I wish I could still use a BlackBerry phone today, I am thrilled that my Toyota likely runs BlackBerry software, QNX.
Have thoughts on BlackBerry’s automotive pivot, or memories of your old BlackBerry phone? Drop a comment below; I read every one.