Qt Mobile Apps in the wild? and successful stories?

billconan

Hello,

Do you know any good Qt mobile apps in the wild? (other than that Qt everywhere demo app). I need to make a framework decision on a new app, I don't know if I should go deep with Qt.

Qt is my mostly familiar framework. As its big fan, I really hope to use it to build my next app. while I'm ok with obj-c and ios framework, I'm a big java hater. Qt gives me the benefit of using C++ for everything, but I have some concerns.

Qt widgets are all designed for desktop. Pull-to-refresh and tons of other mobile ui features are not available with Qt. using it for an app seems to require a lot of ui rewrite. for example, I'm also not sure how Qlistview performs vs. UITableView. I'm ok with tweaking Qlistview and adding pull-to-refresh on top of it, but if there needs to be a rewrite of Qlistview due to low performance or any reason, I think it's a bit too much.
The app I have in mind is not fancy or anything, but it will need to access map and camera/photo library. I'm not sure how well Qt can support camera on both ios and android. And I did see many people trying to solve the map problem. Potentially, I need to play sound and perhaps video. they might not be required at first, but I don't want to rewrite the whole app when I found these features are too hard to do with Qt. For example, I heard that QAudioOuput can't work on Android.
A hybrid approach would be writing a common core in Qt, make it a library and do the ui/camera/map part in native ways. It might be fun on ios, but my previous experience with jni wasn't so good. debugging is another inconvenience if the Qt part is a separate lib.

What do you think? Is Qt for real now? or it's still kinda for pioneers?

could its connivence (cross-platform, good old c++, etc) offset the difficulties?

lots of quality apps first appear on ios and then much later on Android. think about facebook's Paper app as an example. this is no coincidence, Android provides a much worse developing api (and document). I feel like Qt is the way to go to achieve Paper's quality on both platforms. but I can't be sure....

as much as I love Qt, using it or not for the next app is a hard decision.

SGaist

Hi,

IIRC, a similar question was already asked on the necessitas mailing list, you should find there a list of Qt application for Android

Hope it helps

timday

I was under the impression the C++ Qt Widgets (e.g http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/QListView.html ) weren't available on iOS (don't know about Android), only the QML stuff in Qt Quick Controls (e.g http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qml-qtquick-listview.html ). Am I misinformed or out of date?

I have a not-yet-in-the-wild (but one day...) multiplatform Qt app. It has a very lean mobile inspired non-widgety UI, although it was done desktop first so when I eventually tried it on iPad I realized most of the text and things the user needed to be able to tap on were far too small (yup, there's a lot to be said for "mobile first" development). I don't use any fancy mobile HW or services, it's basically a browser/visualiser for some accompanying data. QML+a few C++/OpenGL plugin components works really well for me (I ended up writing a lot less C++ than I expected to when I started the project, because QML is so amazing). My biggest headache currently is "QTBUG-39385":https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39385

JKSH

Hi,

Here's a discussion about Google Play store apps: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.qt.user/10275

I don't have experience building my own mobile app, but here's what I know:
[quote author="billconan" date="1406278688"]1. Qt widgets are all designed for desktop. Pull-to-refresh and tons of other mobile ui features are not available with Qt....[/quote][quote author="timday" date="1406373289"]I was under the impression the C++ Qt Widgets (e.g http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/QListView.html ) weren't available on iOS (don't know about Android), only the QML stuff in Qt Quick Controls (e.g http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qml-qtquick-listview.html )[/quote]Widgets are available on mobile platforms, but are not recommended because they were designed for traditional desktops. It's hard to make widgets behave like native mobile components.

Qt Quick, on the other hand, was specifically designed for mobile platforms. Apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone should use Qt Quick, not Qt Widgets.

[quote author="billconan" date="1406278688"]2. The app I have in mind is not fancy or anything, but it will need to access map and camera/photo library. I'm not sure how well Qt can support camera on both ios and android. And I did see many people trying to solve the map problem. Potentially, I need to play sound and perhaps video. they might not be required at first, but I don't want to rewrite the whole app when I found these features are too hard to do with Qt. For example, I heard that QAudioOuput can't work on Android.[/quote]Qt supports camera and photos on Android and iOS. Maps are not yet supported, however.

billconan

Thank for the information.

I will give QML a try, but I really don't like javascript.

timday

[quote author="billconan" date="1406390981"]I will give QML a try, but I really don't like javascript.[/quote]

Hoho. Neither did I before I started getting into QML. But before you know it you're using it for little bits of glue; conditional assignments, arithmetic expressions, string processing, bits of more complex app logic which you'd have probably originally expected to go into the C++ domain but which are just quicker to try out in QML (it's just so mutable) ... and before you know it JS is your friend.

There's a "story":http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4645881&cid=45899881 about the inventor of Node.js seeing QML and saying "wow, it's HTML5 done right"; I entirely agree: the difference between QML and the stuff the webby world uses always seems to me to be akin to that between Python (which I like) and Perl (which horrifies me).

timday

Just noticed the Qt Blog posted a nice story on a Qt mobile app recently; deserves to be linked from this thread: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/07/21/google-labs-voltair-game-built-with-qt/ (see also http://google.github.io/VoltAir/doc/main/html/index.html#11 )

lucasnunes

I used Qt to develop two applications (both are in Portuguese).
Currently, they are on Google Play and Windows Store. AppStore soon.
They were basically made in QML and some C ++ to connect to our server.

Something that I miss in Qt is the lack of more examples (besides androidextras) for integration between Qt and Android / iOS / Windows Phone.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.solutech.academico

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.solutech.cardapps

http://www.windowsphone.com/pt-br/store/app/cardapps/3a653015-fd97-4ffc-8a85-c2bd7e129945