What is the Future of Qt?

GLOBAL – Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We’ll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress, but for the time being, the Director of Qt’s ecosystem, Daniel Kihlberg, wrote a post on Qt’s official blog on the future of Qt. Below are highlights from his post along with some excellent comments from readers of their blog…

– The retention of Nokia’s 200 million Symbian-users is vital and Nokia has targeted sales of 150 million more Symbian-devices in years to come.

– Nokia also announced it will ship its first MeeGo-related device in 2011, which will rely on the Qt ecosystem – and then will continue with MeeGo as an open source project for future disruption.

– With Qt Quick and Qt SDK 1.1 releases in the coming months we are expecting the Qt developer community to continue to grow – adding to the 400.000 developers using Qt today. Qt is developed together with the community and we expect the pace of innovation to increase even further as the community grows.

– We in Nokia are one of tens of thousands of companies in multiple industries actively using and contributing to Qt, making Qt relevant for both mobile, desktop and other embedded developers.

– Qt expansion: We have continued to hire Qt developers and we will continue to improve and expand Qt in the future. Qt is great at delivering innovation; we have been doing that for 15 years.

– Dreamworks [is] switching all their internal animation tools to Qt and making cool movies like “MegaMind” and “How to Train Your Dragon”.

-Qt is increasingly popular. During 2010, we had 1.5+ million downloads at qt.nokia.com (alone) – twice as much as during 2009.

Aron from Nokia added…

Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation.

Kensai adds…

Nokia’s strategic direction might have indeed changed, but this is only true for the mobile segment. There are lots of other devices (tablets, PCs, etc) that Qt is and will still be hugely relevant. Once you learn the Qt toolkit there is really no way your skills can’t be used somewhere.

And nobody has said that in the future Nokia won’t be selling enough smartphones to amend the deal with Microsoft for a WP7 port of Qt.

Benjamin Arnaud says…

You’ve been using Qt recently and you love it ? Now is the right time to show support and love. We are stronger than marketing choices. If you decide to support the Qt Framework it will continue to improve and surprise us.

Beside, I don’t know about you but I don’t see myself using any other framework for the next decade.

So let’s trust and support the Qt team. This is not a failure, it’s an opportunity to bring beauty from pain.

I believe in Qt Software, so should you.

Read more from MWC 2011