Make no mistake, the main reason Qt Creator exists is to enable and promote Qt-based development and tick a box when selling to customers. They don't sell Creat

Make no mistake, the main reason Qt Creator exists is to enable and promote Qt-based development and tick a box when selling to customers. They don't sell Creator individually (it's free), so they don't really make money from it outside of Qt sales. Qt competes for major business in markets like automotive or general embedded, where vendor frameworks are from the "one-stop solution for Windows" generation that come with IDEs aimed at specialists that get trained to use them, e.g. because they have a mechatronics/Simulink/etc background more than a programming one. Or because they're designers and used to Photoshop/Figma and you need something you can import into. These are often horribly old and crufty Eclipse derivatives or even OG Win32 MFC apps. Examples would be boutique solutions you've never ever heard of but probably used or seen in a car, e.g. the Kanzi toolkit, or STM's TouchGFX for microcontrollers. So Qt decided to make one too to round out the value prop. It's just that Qt (a) grew up originally as a desktop UI toolkit for PCs (so using it for a desktop app works out) and (b) is on a much cleaner, much more general-purpose tech stack, so it happens to actually be fairly good and reasonably general-purpose. Partly also because the Qt folks who wrote it simply used other desktop IDEs or classic hacker's editors before and decided to make a IDE they would themselves like to use. That said, The Qt Company has more recently done some acquisitions that actually do go more into the direction of branching out into development tools. They acquired Froglogic, makers of Squish (a GUI unit testing framework in wide use) and also a Coverity-like code scanner. So who knows, maybe they'll reposition Creator a bit.