Wow, what a day… Nokia outlined its new platform strategy for smartphones, with Windows Phones as it primary smartphone platform in a proposed partnership with Microsoft… and Microsoft’s tools would be used for Nokia Windows Phone application development … and guess what, it has raised a lot of questions in the Qt community.
So the question is, what is the future for Qt?
Qt will continue to play an important role in Nokia. Consider the following:
- 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. To achieve that Nokia needs to continue the modernization of Symbian in Qt – to keep existing consumers engaged and to attract new customers, either upgrading from existing Symbian devices to Qt enabled devices or entirely new to Nokia.
- 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. Nokia can’t afford to be behind the next disruption again and Qt can play an important role in making sure it isn’t.
- 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. With the upcoming release of Qt Quick, we will reach out to new users and make it even easier to create great apps and UIs for many platforms including Symbian and MeeGo.
- The new Qt SDK 1.1 technology preview. We now offer only one SDK for both desktop and mobile developers, which makes it easier to target more platforms by using just one SDK.
- Qt everywhere. Qt continues to make vast inroads into especially low end Linux devices and distro’s. Qt also continues to provide a platform for others to innovate and differentiate upon. For example Dreamworks 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 - and with the up-coming innovation and additional investments in Qt combined with the introduction of open governance, I believe Qt will be used more than ever before.
Daniel Kihlberg
Director Qt Ecosystem - Qt Sales, Marketing and Services
