[Interest] Indie Mobil Program terminated?

[Attila Csipa]

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