Report: Apple has team in Canada working on car operating system

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Apple has dozens of software engineers in Canada building a car operating system, reports Bloomberg. The engineers are said to be working at an office in Kanata, close to the offices of BlackBerry’s QNX, where many of them were previously employed.

The engineers now work at an Apple office in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, about a five-minute walk from QNX, the people said. Apple targeted QNX employees because of their experience developing fundamental components of operating systems and power management, a former QNX executive said. 

The car operating system is the software core of a future Apple car platform, in the same way iOS powers the iPhone. A separate Apple team is developing software that would guide future self-driving cars and run on the operating system, one of the people said.

The report says that autonomous software was just one of many features once planned for Apple’s car initiative. The project has been slimmed down dramatically since its inception, and the team has been given a 2017 deadline to prove it has some direction.

Source: Bloomberg