Duo partner to deliver platform for automotive and robotics industry

“Smart devices have the potential to deliver an unmatched customer experience wherever we may be - in our homes, cars, and anywhere in between,” said I.P. Park, President and CTO of LG Electronics.

“Our partnership with Qt enables us to dramatically enhance webOS, providing our customers with the most advanced platform for the creation of highly immersive devices and services. We look forward to continuing our long-standing collaboration with Qt to deliver memorable experiences in the exciting areas of automotive, smart homes and robotics.”

In order to meet and exceed challenging requirements and navigate the distinct market dynamics of the automotive, smart home and robotics industries, LG selected Qt as its business and technical partner for webOS. The most impactful technology trends of recent years, including AI, IoT and automation, require a new approach to the user experience (UX), and UX has been one of Qt’s primary focus areas since the company’s founding.

Through the partnership, Qt will provide LG with the most powerful end-to-end, integrated and hardware-agnostic development environment for developers, engineers and designers to create innovative and immersive apps and devices. In addition, webOS will officially become a reference operating system of Qt.

The partnership allows customers to leverage webOS’ mature set of middleware-enabled functionality, including features for automotive, connectivity, media and content services, which saves customers significant time and effort in their embedded development projects. Meanwhile, Qt’s feature-rich development tools - including Qt Creator, Qt Design Studio and Qt 3D Studio - support webOS by the fact that webOS will be Qt’s reference OS.

“LG has been a technology leader for generations, which is one of the many reasons they’ve become such a trusted partner of Qt,” said Juha Varelius, CEO of Qt. “With the company’s initiative to expand the reach of webOS into rapidly growing markets, LG is underscoring the massive potential of Qt-enabled connected experiences. By collaborating with LG on this initiative, we’re able to make it easy as possible for our customers to build devices that bring a new definition to the word ‘smart’.”

Today’s smart devices - such as smart watches, voice-controlled robots, and connected cars’ in-vehicle infotainment systems - make consumers’ lives easier through their constant connectivity, highly intuitive user interfaces, and ability to learn their users’ patterns and behaviours.

The webOS platform powers many of the smart home devices in circulation today, including LG Smart TVs and smart home appliances, and has tremendous potential to deliver greater consumer benefits in high growth industries such as the automotive sector.