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Qt 5.1 Released With Android and iOS Technology Previews

95 points by emwa 13y ago

stevelaz 13y ago
This is awesome. Congrats to the Qt team for a what looks like an excellent release! I can't wait to get my fingers dirty with this.
ge0rg 13y ago
Very impressive work, especially with the mobile integration! I hope this will become the next generation of multi-platform development tools, combining performance and flexibility. However, the Android demo apps are 16MB and 23MB in size, respectively. For the larger one (Introduction to Qt5) the uncompressed sizes are: 9MB of data, 26MB native code, 134KB of dalvik code. This looks like a major burden for low-end devices, even though I must admit the demo is looking great (and performs rather fluently on my HTC Vision, running Android 4.2.2).
- pjmlp 13y ago
  This is what puts me away from using Qt for Android development. One of the advices of Google IO this year was to try to keep applications small. According to Google bigger applications are the ones that get deleted first when space gets short. Most of the time are never reinstalled.
  - ge0rg 13y ago
    I consider the memory footprint even more important, though it is hard to find strong relations between APK size and memory use -- except for the "looks like the dev did not care at all" rule. Regarding APK size, you can do miracles by using ProGuard (even with obfuscation disabled), though it will obviously fail for native code, like in the Qt case.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      I just do hobby development on Android. Day job is actually JVM/.NET/C++ enterprise applications. Nonetheless, even my device is not swimming on free space, so I do have some care with it. And given my age, I am used to the time when every byte counted. On my hobby development I tend to do a mix of Java/C++, depending how portable I want to do it.
- peterbotond 13y ago
  the QT team in the past constantly improves their codebase, so i believe the numbers will be better. i use qt since 3.1 and see the improvements in general.
  - joezydeco 13y ago
    Something makes me think that the native code is dynamically loading in the entire QtCore, QtGui, and QtDeclarative libraries to make the native side run. When you build a Qt app statically you can strip all the unused functions out. But doing it for loading by the Android NDK? That seems a little trickier. You'd need to rebuild the libs specifically for that application. Maybe there will be a better solution in the future to handle this, but it also seems likely that the native side wouldn't grow much past this size (i.e. 1 line of "hello world" is 26MB but 100,000 lines of real application code would only grow to 28MB.)
    - zanny 13y ago
      This is actually solved with the Android app Ministro. It downloads and installs qt libraries in shared locations on demand for whatever apps need them, letting you distribute just the app binary, and it will invoke Ministro to get its necessary libraries.
- icefox 13y ago
  When silly puzzle games have hundreds of MB of assets it is okay, but this is a lot? Users don't seem to care or all of the "lets recompile our flash junk" that eats 500MB+ wouldn't do as well as they are doing. If app size matters it is usually the assets that need to be trimmed first. What would be nice if in the app stores they showed how much space your app would you and let you sort on that, give some sort of incentive to reduce your size.
  - mehrzad 13y ago
    No need to get upset at GP. A lot of low-end Android phones have little internal storage and installing to SD is not a default thing. I'd be that most Android apps are under 15MB and a lot of apps that I use are under 3.
- X4 13y ago
  That's the first official Android release! Too early to complain, but Qt is opensource, you can improve it, even if you don't know programming. Just file a bug or drop a note in the forums and help developers debug.
programminggeek 13y ago
Well that's cute.
- programminggeek 13y ago
  It's really hard to make a play on words on the internet.
pbsdp 13y ago
"I wish my apps were written using a poorly integrated non-native toolkit" said no actual user, ever. Nobody wants a Qt-based application port, for most of the same reason nobody wanted a (Java) Swing-based port. They don't want ports, they want native apps. The only people who want to provide Qt-based apps are developers that want to put themselves ahead of their users. [edit] Perhaps downvoters can reference a cross-platform widget toolkit that was successful in the market? So far, Java, Qt, WxWidgets, and Gtk have not succeeded as cross-platform GUI libraries. Are there any break-out successes I'm missing? Otherwise, I don't see what the complaint is, so perhaps you can elucidate and downvote.
- dman 13y ago
  How native are websites? Dont you use them on mobile devices?
  - pbsdp 13y ago
    How are websites holding up against the native App Store apps for apps?
    - kombine 13y ago
      You can't really compare websites with Qt apps. QML was made from the ground up to allow for building fluid UIs. It is rendered using OpenGL. HTML was never meant to be used for app development, hence the poor experience. Qt and QML is just not native(widgets will look different, etc), but it will perform well. And you can always imitate the look and feel of native OS so apps at least don't look too alien.
      - pbsdp 13y ago
        > Qt and QML is just not native(widgets will look different, etc), but it will perform well. Yes, which is not what people want. They want apps that fit in with the larger platform and exploit it's featureset. We already went through this on Mac OS X. I use a Qt/Mac app every day for work, and would ditch it in a second if a native alternative was produced. Unfortunately, it's an extremely niche application, and the competition is nowhere near caught up. > And you can always imitate the look and feel of native OS so apps at least don't look too alien. That's never worked out well for anyone, ever, in the entire history of cross-platform widget library attempts.
shadowmint 13y ago
Great work! Nice seeing QT actually trying to be relevant again, now it's escaped the clutches of Nokia. Here's hoping that Google doesn't decide to depreciate the native apis on android now there are a few options to write apps that don't involve using their crazy lock-in java api.
frozenport 13y ago
Also improved opengl and opengl binaries.

95 points by emwa 13y ago

This is awesome. Congrats to the Qt team for a what looks like an excellent release! I can't wait to get my fingers dirty with this.

ge0rg 13y ago

Very impressive work, especially with the mobile integration! I hope this will become the next generation of multi-platform development tools, combining performance and flexibility. However, the Android demo apps are 16MB and 23MB in size, respectively. For the larger one (Introduction to Qt5) the uncompressed sizes are: 9MB of data, 26MB native code, 134KB of dalvik code. This looks like a major burden for low-end devices, even though I must admit the demo is looking great (and performs rather fluently on my HTC Vision, running Android 4.2.2).

pjmlp 13y ago
This is what puts me away from using Qt for Android development. One of the advices of Google IO this year was to try to keep applications small. According to Google bigger applications are the ones that get deleted first when space gets short. Most of the time are never reinstalled.
- ge0rg 13y ago
  I consider the memory footprint even more important, though it is hard to find strong relations between APK size and memory use -- except for the "looks like the dev did not care at all" rule. Regarding APK size, you can do miracles by using ProGuard (even with obfuscation disabled), though it will obviously fail for native code, like in the Qt case.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I just do hobby development on Android. Day job is actually JVM/.NET/C++ enterprise applications. Nonetheless, even my device is not swimming on free space, so I do have some care with it. And given my age, I am used to the time when every byte counted. On my hobby development I tend to do a mix of Java/C++, depending how portable I want to do it.
peterbotond 13y ago
the QT team in the past constantly improves their codebase, so i believe the numbers will be better. i use qt since 3.1 and see the improvements in general.
- joezydeco 13y ago
  Something makes me think that the native code is dynamically loading in the entire QtCore, QtGui, and QtDeclarative libraries to make the native side run. When you build a Qt app statically you can strip all the unused functions out. But doing it for loading by the Android NDK? That seems a little trickier. You'd need to rebuild the libs specifically for that application. Maybe there will be a better solution in the future to handle this, but it also seems likely that the native side wouldn't grow much past this size (i.e. 1 line of "hello world" is 26MB but 100,000 lines of real application code would only grow to 28MB.)
  - zanny 13y ago
    This is actually solved with the Android app Ministro. It downloads and installs qt libraries in shared locations on demand for whatever apps need them, letting you distribute just the app binary, and it will invoke Ministro to get its necessary libraries.
icefox 13y ago
When silly puzzle games have hundreds of MB of assets it is okay, but this is a lot? Users don't seem to care or all of the "lets recompile our flash junk" that eats 500MB+ wouldn't do as well as they are doing. If app size matters it is usually the assets that need to be trimmed first. What would be nice if in the app stores they showed how much space your app would you and let you sort on that, give some sort of incentive to reduce your size.
- mehrzad 13y ago
  No need to get upset at GP. A lot of low-end Android phones have little internal storage and installing to SD is not a default thing. I'd be that most Android apps are under 15MB and a lot of apps that I use are under 3.
X4 13y ago
That's the first official Android release! Too early to complain, but Qt is opensource, you can improve it, even if you don't know programming. Just file a bug or drop a note in the forums and help developers debug.

programminggeek 13y ago

Well that's cute.

programminggeek 13y ago
It's really hard to make a play on words on the internet.

pbsdp 13y ago

"I wish my apps were written using a poorly integrated non-native toolkit" said no actual user, ever. Nobody wants a Qt-based application port, for most of the same reason nobody wanted a (Java) Swing-based port. They don't want ports, they want native apps. The only people who want to provide Qt-based apps are developers that want to put themselves ahead of their users. [edit] Perhaps downvoters can reference a cross-platform widget toolkit that was successful in the market? So far, Java, Qt, WxWidgets, and Gtk have not succeeded as cross-platform GUI libraries. Are there any break-out successes I'm missing? Otherwise, I don't see what the complaint is, so perhaps you can elucidate and downvote.

dman 13y ago
How native are websites? Dont you use them on mobile devices?
- pbsdp 13y ago
  How are websites holding up against the native App Store apps for apps?
  - kombine 13y ago
    You can't really compare websites with Qt apps. QML was made from the ground up to allow for building fluid UIs. It is rendered using OpenGL. HTML was never meant to be used for app development, hence the poor experience. Qt and QML is just not native(widgets will look different, etc), but it will perform well. And you can always imitate the look and feel of native OS so apps at least don't look too alien.
    - pbsdp 13y ago
      > Qt and QML is just not native(widgets will look different, etc), but it will perform well. Yes, which is not what people want. They want apps that fit in with the larger platform and exploit it's featureset. We already went through this on Mac OS X. I use a Qt/Mac app every day for work, and would ditch it in a second if a native alternative was produced. Unfortunately, it's an extremely niche application, and the competition is nowhere near caught up. > And you can always imitate the look and feel of native OS so apps at least don't look too alien. That's never worked out well for anyone, ever, in the entire history of cross-platform widget library attempts.

shadowmint 13y ago

Great work! Nice seeing QT actually trying to be relevant again, now it's escaped the clutches of Nokia. Here's hoping that Google doesn't decide to depreciate the native apis on android now there are a few options to write apps that don't involve using their crazy lock-in java api.

frozenport 13y ago

Also improved opengl and opengl binaries.