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Comment by harhargange | Hacker News Reader

As someone who still uses a QNX phone, the Blackberry Q10 as my second phone, I’m not just optimistic for the return of the cross-platform and secure os, I’m rooting for it. Especially for portable Linux handhelds. If Blackberry were to release a phone tomorrow, it would instantly be the most secure android phone. I still run some of my favourite android apps on my BB10os via the android translation layer.

Some comments mentioning QNX can run Swift code makes me think of it could also run iPhone apps.

While Blackberry exited the phone market, I’m surprised to know QNX is still the most popular os for cars. With 275 million devices running it atm.

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> QNX can run Swift code makes me think of it could also run iPhone apps.

Not at all. That is like saying because it can run C, it can run windows apps. To run iPhone apps you would need all the libraries and runtimes ported, including the whole GUI. Just not happening.

Tehnically, BB10 could run iOS apps at the beginning but, they disabled it before the release of PlayBook. Bad call.

Swift is probably less than 1% of the what it takes to run iPhone apps, you can get Swift for Windows too, but it is nowhere near able to run iPhone apps. The problem is all the libraries an iPhone app expects to be available on the host OS, all the multimedia stuff and so on, those libraries on iPhone are large and advanced, and not available for porting to any OS outside of Apple.

Swift != SwiftUI. You need the latter to run modern iOS apps written in Swift.

It's great that Apple are pushing Swift out there a bit, but honestly if they want the World to catch fire with it, they need to give away the Crown Jewels and get SwiftUI out there as well.

Meanwhile, it's great that QNX is supporting modern languages. I can imagine having a bit of fun with this developer desktop and seeing how modern tooling plays nicely with it.

.NET is doing pretty good without all cross platform UI.

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