How BlackBerry Staged a Comeback by Winning Over Car Companies | The Walrus

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Vladimir Srajber, Landiva Weber (Pexels) / Alana Enahoro

Dubbed “Crackberry” by ardent users—Webster’s New World College Dictionary proclaimed it the Word of the Year in 2006—the impact and influence of the BlackBerry device in the early 2000s could be found everywhere. It featured in pop song titles and explicit rap lyrics; Kim Kardashian was a loyal user; former United States president Barack Obama famously said he was “clinging” to his BlackBerry and that they would have to “pry it out of [his] hands” when he entered office.

Key points

After BlackBerry’s mobile business faltered, the company pivoted to cybersecurity and software

QNX, an operating system acquired and owned by BlackBerry, now brings in half of the company’s total revenue

QNX is a critical component used in cars, medicine, and nuclear power due to its ability to handle precision timing

The Blackberry was the signature product of Research In Motion, or RIM. Founded in 1984 by University of Waterloo engineering students Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, the company paved the way for future smartphones. At its peak in 2009, it commanded at least 43 percent of the US market and 20 percent of the international market. By 2011, 77 million annual subscribers couldn’t get enough of the seemingly indestructible devices and their tactile QWERTY keyboard buttons. But new smartphones, such as the iPhone and Android, kept eating into Blackberry’s market share. Fortunes dwindled quickly, and the company officially changed its name to BlackBerry in 2013 to signal both a fresh start and to maximize on the brand recognition. But within months, a “for sale” sign was up, though ultimately, there would be no deal.

By 2016, the company’s market share had nosedived to 0 percent, according to research firm Gartner. That same year, the company announced it would no longer manufacture its own devices and outsourced production to Chinese electronics company TCL. In January 2022, the company formally decommissioned the BlackBerry service, shutting down the software and infrastructure that underpinned its legacy mobile devices. You might still find BlackBerry-branded phones in the wild, running on Android, but as far as the public was concerned, BlackBerry seemed relegated to the history books.

Yet the groundwork for the company’s future was laid more than a decade earlier, when RIM bought QNX (pronounced “Q-nix”) for $200 million in April 2010. Founded in 1980 by another pair of University of Waterloo students, Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge, QNX was an operating system that would become part of RIM’s strategy to beef up future BlackBerry devices. As its core mobile business faltered, however, the company began pivoting to cybersecurity and software for Internet of Things (IoT) under the helm of then chief executive officer John Chen, who had been brought in to save a business that was “just days away from potential bankruptcy.”

Following a years-long restructuring effort that included selling 32,000 patents for up to $900 million in 2023, the smartphone pioneer that was once left for dead is showing signs of growth. As the Wall Street Journal recently described it, “the division that was once a rounding error is the reason that BlackBerry is suddenly making money again.” Thanks to QNX, which now brings in half of the company’s total revenue, BlackBerry managed to eek out five straight profitable quarters by mid-2026—a milestone not seen since the heyday of BlackBerry phones.

The company has also recovered something even rarer than profits: the ability to matter.

For years, BlackBerry has been quietly carving out a role as the go-to software technology for critical systems in cars, medicine, and even nuclear power plants because of QNX. If you drive, it probably had a hand in getting you from point A to point B. And if you’ve ever had an X-ray or CT scan, you can probably thank BlackBerry for that too. Like its once-ubiquitous phone, BlackBerry is still everywhere—we just don’t see it.

In medicine, QNX is used by 90 percent of medical device manufacturers in more than fifty different types of devices, including diagnostic imaging, therapeutics, and surgical robotics.

This invisible infrastructure has also become an automotive standard, serving as the brain for running your car, helping to power and manage everything from the dashboard to the cameras and safety sensors monitoring your surroundings to the music you listen to. Advanced Driver...