The Qt for Android port is approaching a major milestone. With the final release of Qt 5.2, Android will become a Qt reference (Tier 1) configuration. The work with the Qt for Android port has been actively ongoing for the past year within the Qt Project, and before that, as part of the Necessitas project hosted by KDE. The authors of Necessitas contributed their work to the Qt Project in the autumn of 2012, which gave a tremendous boost to the development of the port. The dual licensing model of the Qt Project allows both commercial and open-source licensees to benefit from the possibility of running Qt applications on Android devices.
I am very happy to announce that Digia and the KDE Free Qt Foundation have also included the Qt Android port into the KDE Free Qt Foundation Agreement. Via this agreement Android is treated similarly as the KDE Window System. This agreement is the ultimate guarantee that Digia wants to keep both commercial and open-source versions of Qt viable. Although the money to keep Qt R&D ongoing comes from the paid versions of Qt, we believe that the best way to stay ahead and keep Qt as the leading cross-platform application and UI framework is to develop Qt in the open.
I want to once more thank Mr. BogDan Vatra, Mr. Raymond Donnelly, and all the other pioneers who started the Qt for Android port in the Necessitas project, as well as everyone who has contributed to it within the Qt Project. Based on this work, millions of Android users will be able to enjoy the great applications developed with Qt.
Some background and thoughts on this are available in blog post by BogDan.
