Creating HTML5 apps for the car

Adding a downloadable app capability to the car isn't just a matter of bolting consumer-grade technology onto an automotive hardware platform, dusting your hands, and calling it a day.

Apps should be integrated into the vehicle experience, which means they need access to vehicle resources. But you must carefully control that access: the apps should be isolated in their own environment to protect the rest of the car software. Most of all, the apps need to conform to safe driving practices, which typically entails a re-write of the user interface.

Still, we should leverage as much as possible from the mobile world. That’s where the real innovation happens; the mobile community provides a much bigger pool of fresh ideas than automakers could ever build by themselves. And the best tools and libraries are focused on mobile development.

That’s why QNX Software Systems is building the best of both: an application tool that draws heavily from mobile, but is adapted to the car. It's provisionally named the HTML5 SDK for the QNX CAR application platform and, while it isn't yet available to the public, beta versions are now available for QNX CAR platform customers.

For a preview of what we’ll be rolling out, check out this video: