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Qt Everywhere: Community Android Port Announces Alpha Release

Thursday, 24 February 2011  |  Stuart Jarvis

The Necessitas team, led by Bogdan Vatra, is pleased to announce the first alpha release of Necessitas, a Qt SDK for the Android mobile platform.

The release contains the following:

  • Ministro, a system-wide Qt libraries installer
  • Qt framework, precompiled for Android (only in a Linux 32-bit version)
  • Qt Creator for Android - to create, manage, compile, deploy and debug your software

Although these make extensive use of free software from Nokia Qt Development Frameworks and Google, this is a community project and is not supported or endorsed by either Nokia or Google at present. The alpha release of Necessitas is exciting for KDE as support for Qt is a prerequisite to get KDE software running on a wide range of mobile platforms. The project also underlines Qt's value in community-led, cross platform applications, which KDE strongly supports.

As an alpha release, this is not yet ready for production use and there are known issues and features not yet implemented. The development team welcomes contributions to improve the software and input from potential contributors.

Comments:

Great! - thequickbrownfox - 2011-02-24

if $kde-apps AND android TRUE THEN ^_^ ELSE : ( Way to go, plenty of applications from kde would rock on android, kmail, korganizer, akregator, okular, etc - and have a bigger audience then on meego. I sincerely believe that a lot of kde users would love to have syncing in place with native kde-apps on their mobile - and make plenty use of the donate button in the app store. Thanks to the Necessitas to bring that dream a little closer : )

Finally a decent framework - fduraibi - 2011-02-24

Finally a decent framework for making android apps. Will it allow developers to make native applications? or they will still somehow rely on the android dalvik java VM? Keep up the good work guys :)

All the answers in BehindKDE soon - pgquiles - 2011-02-24

I have interviewed the lead developer for BehindKDE (Platforms series). I still need to edit, spellcheck, etc but you can expect all the answers by Monday :-)

Eh... Ok i don't get the difference... - andrewm - 2011-02-25

So what is the difference between this Android port and the already existent port <a href="http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/">Android Lighthouse</a>? I think maintaining 2 different community ports is a waste of time and I would hope to see them consolidate their work or just merge the projects. - Andrew - <a href="http://www.graticule.com">Graticule Software Engineer</a>

Might be the same project - moofang - 2011-02-25

I'm not sure, but they may well be the same thing (name change? release codename?), or at least significantly overlapped. Notably, the android lighthouse wiki page on preparing and compiling Qt <a href="http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/wiki/Compile">here</a> now directs people to the equivalent necessitas wiki page, and also, less significantly but more interestingly, the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/p/necessitas/home/">necessitas</a> home page says "Welcome on the home of the android lighthouse project." at the top. They both use the same logo too :)

Cant wait to see them! I hope - retrovisor - 2011-02-26

Cant wait to see them! I hope this guys have the answer.. Eduardo - <a href="http://www.bolsadeofertas.com.br">Compra coletiva</a>

Yes it is the same project - odysseus - 2011-02-28

Yes it is the same project just with a name that won't run the risk of a trademark dispute with Nokia.

You write native c++ code and - odysseus - 2011-02-28

You write native c++ code and there's a thin js shim to fool android into running the native code. Qt uses the NDK and not dalvik, as can the app developer.

Ready! Go! - pgquiles - 2011-02-28

Interview is now live: http://www.behindkde.org/node/925

Java, not JavaScript - The User - 2011-03-01