Currently my line of work is working with infotainment systems in vehicles. The system is very complex and I wonder if having side projects of mobile development will help me understanding automotive OS. For example, my company is creating an infotainment completely from scratch, and we are using Android Automotive 11. If my understanding is correct, Android OS is the basis of Android Automotive and there may a lot of overlap, or Android Automotive is a branch off of Android OS.

To me Android Automotive is very overwhelming and difficult to understand coming approaching it from a student perspective. This is why I wonder if Android mobile development is a good place to start to understand Android Automotive. There are good tutorials for Android development in general so I think once I understand the OS infrastructure, different layers (e.g. HAL, application, etc), I could apply that to my current project.

And to be honest, I don’t quite have a big interest in vehicles. I am working in the automotive industry because that’s just how I got my foot in the door for tech working as a non-engineering position at an automotive supplier company. This is why mobile development might be my ticket out because understanding mobile operating systems aren’t just limited to vehicles, but any kind of mobile system that requires operating systems. Learning mobile OS would be helpful not just for my current job, but for my future job prospects.