On 7/11/2015 2:17 PM, Bob Hood wrote: > On 7/11/2015 5:00 AM, Nicola De Filippo wrote: >>> Mobile never was a core area for Qt in the post-Nokia period, and while >>> there are good intentions, I'm sure there is a line after which the >>> return on investment is really low from a commercial license business >>> perspective. Simply put, the core philosophies of Qt are not exactly >>> mobile-friendly, and every effort there is an uphill battle (for which >>> they are apparently not getting paid enough). >> if it’s the status quo, maybe is better that the Qt company leave the >> mobile market and work only for embedded or desktop market. >> So we old qt developer can see for other tools and the Qt company >> spend all the energy for other market. I think that here all want the >> better for Qt, i hope. > > No, I don't think you can simply ignore mobile. Even desktop > developers (like me) would like to have a means of extending the > desktop functionality via mobile. Being able to use the same (or > largely identical) code base for this is, of course, the ideal > environment for a Qt developer.
It would be silly to abandon all the work that has already been done, and cross-screen development is more important than ever. If you look at what they did, it's exactly what you say - they offered the mobile platforms as a bonus for professional developers working on the desktop. If you're paying your full license, it's also easier to justify supporting your specific use-cases/bugs on a mobile platform. > > I agree that mobile is an afterthought for Qt, and the Trolls have > been trying to provide that within the existing framework. It's been > a slow road, but that is to be expected in a framework where mobile > was not the intention from the beginning (like the competitors). But > I can see that Qt is at a decision point: Deploy resources to shore up > the mobile support in Qt and get into the game as a real player, or > (as you say) ignore mobile, focus on their historical strengths, and > risk becoming more and more irrelevant in terms of revenue as the > commercial share of desktop applications continues to shrink. Shaping up on mobile is going to be super difficult. Mobile is on a superfast evolution path. Multiple OSes with new APIs (and often new look and feel) launched on a yearly base. Qt is on a fixed, 6-12 month schedule, and has to abstract away all those APIs into a superset API of it's own. This worked on Desktop, as there you got your new OS release once in ~5 years, and the changes were still largely cosmetic and backwards compatible. However, on mobile, this means that in a *best* case scenario, mobile Qt will be 6-12 months late compared to solutions primarily targeting mobile (eg Xamarin), and will have to put far more resources into it than mobile frameworks as the abstraction/middleware is heavier and harder to maintain, with a danger of the APIs evolving in really messy ways to be able to cover all supported platforms. This also is the reason why the compatibility matrix is so hit-and-miss on mobile, and why so little of new APIs are supported until they become de facto standards (example: there is no public stable release with a stable BTLE API, and the single source promise for full-featured cross-platform mobile UIs is turning into a permanent mirage). Best regards, Attila _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
