How to: Porting Apps from iPhone and Android to Qt

Got an Android or iPhone App? Want an even larger audience and another distribution point? Port to Qt and get your awesome app on the Ovi Store. Forum Nokia has a helpful page on their Wiki detailing instructions on porting Android and iPhone apps to Qt.

The page was updated last in June, so now Nokia have 24 Million smartphones, and 41% of the GLOBAL smartphone market share (up from 40% and 21 million). Today, OPK mentioned Nokia expects 50 Million Symbian^3 devices to be shipped over next few years (though what exact time scale is not mentioned) Now also note the possible Millions of MeeGo devices, not just from Nokia, but from the 20 partners lined up to make MeeGo devices. Plus there’s the Maemo 5 crowd (N900 users).

The programming language for Qt is C++. Modern classes and functions that are familiar from other technologies make it extremely easy to adapt to this language. If you are experienced with the Objective-C or Javaâ„¢ programming language, you will have your first Qt C++ project running within hours.

Qt C++ is ideal for application logic, and the script-like Qt Quick speeds up the creation of advanced user interfaces. You can also write native platform code and call it from Qt, to reach each and every feature of the device.

Selecting one approach does not tie your hands. You can freely code the network functionality with low-level Qt and make things look smooth with QML and scripts.

Qt provides all modern classes and functionalities familiar from iPhone and Android. This makes it easy to keep the application logic close to the original when porting

How to Proceed with Porting

• Porting from iPhone to Nokia Platforms – high-level starting guide for porting iPhone applications to Qt
• Porting from Android to Nokia Platforms – high-level starting guide for porting Android applications to Qt
• Fundamental use cases for porting iPhone and Android applications to Qt – a few powerful modules and how to port those to Qt
• Useful-porting-examples – common features needed for porting applications to Qt
• Qt Quick examples for porting – examples for creating fancy UI elements with Qt Quick
• Porting iPhone web app to WRT on Nokia devices, if your existing iPhone application is based on a server-side web implementation or is mostly implemented in HTML/CSS and JavaScriptâ„¢ in the client side.
• WordPress developer story describes the real-life experience of porting an application from iPhone to Qt. Both iPhone and Qt sources of the WordPress client are also available as open source.

• See also Forum Nokia Design and User Experience Guide for ideas on how to achieve the best possible user experience when porting your application for Nokia devices.

WordPress Developer Story

As linked above, this is a neat one to take a look at as it’s first hand example of porting from iPhone to Qt.

To make a long story short, it is easy to keep the original structure of the application when porting from iPhone to Qt. You can directly rewrite the core code to Qt just by looking at the original source

Compared to many other platforms, tweaking of the UI is incredibly quick. You can set values, launch it on the desktop, and, if it looks good, add to the device style sheet and deploy for verification’

Forum Nokia Via @bperry

Tags: Android, How to:, iOS to Qt, Iphone to Qt, Maemo, MeeGo, Nokia, Porting, QT, tutorial

Category: How to:, Nokia, Qt