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Nokia Makes Qt its Sole App Development Framework

October 21st, 2010 • Mark Guim • 4 comments

Nokia made the decision today to focus on Qt as the sole application development framework. This ensures that applications developed on this platform will continue to be compatible with future evolutions of Symbian as well as upcoming MeeGo products such as the Nokia N9. To demonstrate its commitment to Qt, Nokia promises to develop own future applications using Qt.

Nokia has long been advocating Qt to developers for a while now, but it’s surprising that their own recent apps such as the updated Ovi Store, Foursquare, and Social Networks aren’t even created on this platform. These apps use Web Run Time. WRT performance has been improved in Symbian^3 devices like the Nokia N8, but I find apps developed on this platform sluggish in general.

In the end, the type of platform apps are developed in don’t really matter to consumers. What’s important is the user experience. Useful apps that look and perform well make us happy.

Also part of the announcement is Nokia’s intent to support HTML5 in Web browsers. You can read the whole press release here.

To learn more, Rich Green, CTO talks about the development strategy on video below. Click here if it’s not visible in your RSS reader.

Kloves2fly

yesssss! its about time…no need to buy a new device to get new experience…Nokia is really making the right moves here.
Anonymous

Qt is awesome. There are only a few applications available for the N900 written in Qt, but they’ve been pretty easy to use and definitely not sluggish. Can’t wait to see a few more come out, especially on my future N8
darktears

WRT uses QtWebKit so it uses Qt. The latest Ovi store is using Qt, especially on the N8 that’s why the N8 ship Qt 4.6.3.
random

I think one great advantage of MeeGo is, that it is more Linux than any other handheld OS out there, which allows developers to fully unleash it’s power using great and fast frameworks such as OpenGL. However I also think that there should be the same amount of development choices available as there for standard Linux distributions. And though Qt may be the right foundation to do so it is still a limiting factor. If there is an active team (the community, maybe) that checks the quality and performance of created applications disregarding their programming language/dependencies this may attract many developers and enthusiasts and allows for a great variety of interesting applications.