[Qt-interest] How can I write Qt apps for my everyday cell phone?

[Yuvraaj Kelkar]

I've yet to find a recent Nokia smartphone that works on Verizon (CDMA).
I think the closest you can get would be to buy an Android CDMA phone
and then develop and run Qt apps on it.

Assuming you get an Android phone and root it:
1. Look at the tremendous work done by Bogdan Vatra to port Qt to
Android: http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/necessitas/
2. Use qtcreator and start coding! The platform (necessitas) can be
Windows, Linux or Mac.

Your Qt knowledge will be useful to reduce the learning curve.
However, it will not be enough to make quality apps on mobile phones.
There are bunch of things you will need to learn including designing
for smaller screen layouts, reducing battery consumption, simplified
UI, following the behavior of the rest of the software on that
platform and so on.

Knowledge of QtMobility will be required if you want to use phone
specific functionality thats usually not present on the desktop (eg.
accelerometer).
Special hardware: I guess a USB cable to connect your phone to your
dev setup may be necessary... otoh, if your phone has wifi, then the
home wifi network should be good enough.

What can go wrong? : Rooting the phone may void your warranty. A
reflash may be necessary once in a while. Badly written code can eat
up your battery in an hour instead of the usual 6-8 hours. Using a
data plan can increase your monthly bill and so on...
When my cellphone becomes flaky, I kill my app(s), reboot or reflash
depending on the severity of the flakiness. If you think about it,
this is pretty much what you'd do on your desktop app test machine.

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:08 AM, K. Frank <kfrank29.c at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello List!
>
> In a short summary, what are some of the the concrete things I would
> have to do to build and run Qt apps on a cell phone I use day to day?
>
> I know this is an open-ended question, but any practical advice would
> be appreciated.
>
> What cell phone should I buy?  (I live in the northeast U.S. and use
> Verizon Wireless, and I don't want to change.)  I would want a good
> quality smart phone, but I would be willing to make some compromises
> to get a convenient Qt platform.
>
> Would I need any special hardware to build the apps or load them onto
> the cell phone?  Would I need a special version of Qt or a certain compiler,
> or other software?  (Right now I use mingw for Qt.)
>
> Would I need a special host for development?  (Right now I use windows,
> but it could be linux.)
>
> Where would QML and Qt mobility come into all of this?
>
> How much of my desktop Qt knowledge and code would be useful for my
> cell phone apps?
>
> I don't really mind if my apps themselves are buggy (my fault, at any rate),
> but how much would I risk making my cell phone flaky or unusable?
>
> Any hidden gotcha's or expenses?
>
> Any other quick thoughts?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> K. Frank
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