Rivian OS is possibly Android Based

[DJG]

Rivian developers will absolutely create an app just for Rivians. If Rivian were leveraging existing off-the-shelf apps, their app offerings wouldn't be so sparse right now.

Well nothing is completely off the shelf, there is a little window dressing/integration to be done of course. But there could be any number of reasons there aren't more right now - they simply didn't/don't want there to be for design reasons; they did, but it wasn't feasible with limited staff (and so many other basic things to get done) in pre-production to get it done so it was put further out in the roadmap. Who knows.

Rivian has yet to create any of their own apps. They may or may not in the future, but they haven't yet. Maps are from Mapbox, music is third party and the FM tuner isn't what I'd call an app, voice assistant is Alexa....I see their role as merely evaluating and selecting, and then putting the final touches on 3rd party apps for the infotainment. I don't expect them to create a Rivian Music app, for instance.

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[electruck]

Well nothing is completely off the shelf, there is a little window dressing/integration to be done of course. But there could be any number of reasons there aren't more right now - they simply didn't/don't want there to be for design reasons; they did, but it wasn't feasible with limited staff (and so many other basic things to get done) in pre-production to get it done so it was put further out in the roadmap. Who knows.

Rivian has yet to create any of their own apps. They may or may not in the future, but they haven't yet. Maps are from Mapbox, music is third party and the FM tuner isn't what I'd call an app, voice assistant is Alexa....I see their role as merely evaluating and selecting, and then putting the final touches on 3rd party apps for the infotainment. I don't expect them to create a Rivian Music app, for instance.

Yes, of course they're building on top of 3rd party APIs and SDKs. The UI, however, is all Rivian developed. Your previous post seemed to suggest that Rivian was merely installing a Spotify client from the Play Store which is definitely not the case.

 

[AdamUCF]

I hope you are right, but those quotes do NOT count as evidence the job posting is referring to the vehicle OS software. All of those examples are important for phone apps and don't necessarily mean what you want them to mean.

I posted other strong evidence over here https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/threads/r1t-network-traffic.6522/post-172367 (though it appears the pictures in my first post broke).
Way too much strong, corroborating evidence leaving no doubt in my mind that the infotainment is Android.

 

[usofrob]

As someone who was recently working at a tier 1 on infotainment systems, I can say there is a strong push to have a single computer drive the infotainment and driver display using some sort of virtualization. The advantage is better performance and cheaper to produce than separate boxes. This seems very likely in Rivian's case as their infotainment is very fast. It being fast also increases the chances it's not normal Android, but CPUs are pretty fast now and Android has gotten more efficient. And it's not that difficult to lock it all down with unique keys for every level.

Having qnx virtualization with qnx running the safety critical and another instance running Android is very possible considering the link someone shared above about trout. But it could just add easily be running Android apps with an adapter in qnx.

I think the easiest way to find out would be to open up the box and look what CPU is inside, then look up the BSP provided for that CPU/soc. Having the BSP will also provide the best options for checking the robustness of their security implementation. But, like I said, it's actually pretty easy to lock these things down now. But it could open pretty quickly if the private key got out. Without that, I wouldn't pursue this avenue. (Or honestly, even with that, as it's a lot of work to get things working well.)

Regarding wireless AA and CP, I've worked on the team getting that working as well. It took quite a bit of tuning to work well because the WiFi is still used for other things at the same time and causes interference. There's a lot more to it than just running the application. Also, I think CP requires an Apple ic for authentication, which Rivian wouldn't have. AA doesn't have that limitation and is simpler to implement over USB then CP. But because it's likely in a VM they may not just pass everything through.

The best option I've seen (for Tesla) is to use an external device that's connects to the phone for AA or CP and have it share over WiFi to the infotainment web browser. This way nothing needs to be broken.

For Rivian to have Spotify on their infotainment, they very likely worked directly with them. Someone had to customize the UI for Rivian specific. and it saying for Android isn't definitive as that's just a string somewhere in the code, but it's likely to have been based on the Android code.

One final thing, if this is Android there may still be a way to enable adb via the UI through possibly Rivian specific secret menus. Particularly in the early stages of development as it can be really helpful to the infotainment developers and testers to update some apps.

 

[AdamUCF]

Rivian would have to be going way out of their way to fake these user agent strings for it to not be Android.

 

[godfodder0901]

Rivian would have to be going way out of their way to fake these user agent strings for it to not be Android.

I don't know about way out of their way... Simple as changing the User-Agent string in the GET or POST and simple enough to hard code. That said, not much to gain in doing so IMHO.

 

[lostpacket]

Yeah to be fair that user agent is set by the application code not the OS. but usually application developers would read the OS to generate the string, not hard code it.

For a qnx Android app adapter layer does that give qnx control over theming? I'd imagine it would have to provide ui themes and widgets for the app to work.

Rivian clearly customized the theme but if that is easier in aaos or a qnx adapter I'm not sure

 

[AdamUCF]

I don't know about way out of their way... Simple as changing the User-Agent string in the GET or POST and simple enough to hard code. That said, not much to gain in doing so IMHO.

I say way out of their way because they would be specifically crafting a plausible Android UA just for fun. And it's not one app... it's multiple. That one is obviously from TuneIn but there's other things with different but still Android UAs. It would be such a bizarre thing to put effort into.

Not just the UA strings but the fact that it's making these calls...

 

[godfodder0901]

I say way out of their way because they would be specifically crafting a plausible Android UA just for fun. And it's not one app... it's multiple. That one is obviously from TuneIn but there's other things with different but still Android UAs. It would be such a bizarre thing to put effort into.

Not just the UA strings but the fact that it's making these calls...

Yeah, there is no plausible reason for them to do this. The juice isn't worth the squeeze as it were. I fully agree we're looking at legit AAOS traffic.

 

[LeoH]

Well are we saying it is Android OS based, or are they just using the Android modified Kernel (ACKs)? I never really both with these things because I am just happy it's not apple or Microsoft based lol

 

[pc500]

I posted other strong evidence over here https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/threads/r1t-network-traffic.6522/post-172367 (though it appears the pictures in my first post broke).
Way too much strong, corroborating evidence leaving no doubt in my mind that the infotainment is Android.

This probably seals the deal:



https://www.youtubbe.com/watch?v=0T_zvUEqsD4

Ok, fix the spelling of Youtubbe and paste it in. The forum link generator is broken.

 

[pc500]

"

Yeah, there is no plausible reason for them to do this. The juice isn't worth the squeeze as it were. I fully agree we're looking at legit AAOS traffic.

And, if in doubt, use the career site as a news source.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/rivian/jobs/4585340003

Or
https://boards.greenhouse.io/rivian/jobs/5117845003

• Design and develop Rivian Navigation and Infotainment applications on Android OS

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