Nokia Tries To Ease Developer Worries Over Qt Future

Qt Development Frameworks, which is owned by Nokia following its acquisition of Trolltech, has officially confirmed that Qt is not dead as a mobile developer’s platform.

The confirmation follows speculation on the future Qt, after Nokia announced a deal with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone operating system. Nokia said at the time that Qt would remain the development platform for Symbian and MeeGo.

And now this has been officially confirmed on a Nokia blog for the cross-platform application and GUI development framework. “Unequivocally, Qt is not dead. This morning we heard top Nokia executives like CTO Rich Green talk about Qt and the future,” wrote Aron Kozak.

Developer Commitment

“Qt will continue to live on through Symbian, MeeGo and the non-mobile Qt industries and platforms,” he wrote.

He said that Nokia’s CTO Rich Green had reiterated the following points during the Nokia Developer Day:

• “We (Nokia) are still very much big fans (of Qt).”
• “We will continue working on Qt, enhancing it.”
• “In the Mobile Phone segments we are going to be examining Qt technologies.”
• “Qt Quick is proving to be an incredibly productive platform – remarkably productive and powerful – and this will continue.”

Green also apparently said that Nokia will update devices with later versions of Qt and Qt Quick (in reference to Symbian).

This reassurance came after the blogger met with Sebastian Nyström, Nokia’s VP of Application Services and Frameworks, and attended internal Nokia briefings, as well as meet with Nokia CTO Rich Green.

It is thought that there are around 400,000 developers using Qt today. Indeed, during 2010, Qt had 1.5 plus million downloads at qt.nokia.com – twice as many as during 2009.

“We will continue to invest in the development of Symbian and continue to release devices based upon Symbian,” said Nokia CEO Stephen Elop at the press conference announcing the Windows Phone 7 deal.

Beta On The Way

Elop reiterated that Nokia will ship a large number of Symbian devices over the next couple years. 150 million is the current prediction, in addition to the millions of existing Qt-enabled phones already on the market.

The Qt blog also confirmed that it is also moving ahead with the Qt SDK 1.1. “This will be the first time we ship Qt Quick in a combined package. We aim to have the beta out in the near future although we can’t say quite when yet.”

“There is no magical statement we can make that proves things will be great, however we will try to maintain open communication as we progress,” said the Qt blog. “We will prove to you that Qt is still being developed, we will celebrate Qt victories (both within Nokia and in the ecosystem), and we encourage you to participate to help ensure we are able to keep Qt going in the right direction.”

Nokia Betrayal?

Despite this, there were still some concerns among the development community.

“Who do you think will now want to develop for Symbian Qt and why would anyone want to develop for WP7 when they know it will be the only OS where their app would run?,” commented Ben Glenn.

“There are what, 400k Qt developers out there, right?,” wrote Darron Black. “I’d seriously doubt even 25 percent of them would EVER move to WP7. (If they were the kind of people who would, they’d have followed the C# bandwagon years ago). No, these people will find other Qt work, or move to some other platform depending on their goals (Android, etc).”

“Qt on WP7 would give continuity, and it would totally change the character of this whole thing,” Black wrote. “At the moment, Nokia has performed a massive betrayal. If the Qt Everywhere mantra was instead actually followed through, then we’d just be looking at a new platform. I’d be fine with that. (Sorry, Symbian). Nokia is simply throwing away most of it’s developer base to appease a new partner… one who’s history in partnerships is pretty clearly negative.”