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 Java™ 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 JavaScript™ 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
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This is excellent, i’ve been wondering how developers would do this as easily as possible.
Does anyone know of any iPhone or Android to Qt source code converters or is a manual rewrite essential? I can imagine logic can contest easily and many API calls converted to equivalents in Qt.. or not?
Contest easily? I meant convert easily! That’s wriat happens typing in predictive text on your phone
And so it begins, Qt is going to take over the world!!! jk jk
Amen to that! Lolz
Qt is the future man.
Sym^3 Sym^4 MeeGo = destruction of iOS and Android and Nokia regaining their prestige in the high-end smartphone market!
Nokia FTW!
Hey Andre, my idea just got approved on ideas.symbian.org
Its about browser improvements and a redesign of keyboard including pop-up style keyboard with multitouch. here’s the link:
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=8503
Already voted for your idea Keith. As we know there seems to be a new version of the symbian browser in the works but let’s hope they can implement some of your suggestions.
Good, this is good step in increasing the number of interesting apps of for the Ovi store it seems like Nokia are doing everything to increase the number of quality apps for the Ovi store quietly behind the scene
fantastic! that mean all the best selected apps AND GAMES OFF COURSE for android and iphone shall get a easily porting to symbian/meego!! GO QT
Awesome news, so apple will lose appstore advantage in the near future,
old apple advantages
multitouch advanatge
appstore advanatge
ui advantage(s4 and meego)
new nokia advantages
cheaper price
more complete hardware features
more powerful os
wow super cool rocking news so qt gives more applications than others.
i saw in news
2.5million downloads available for iphone
1million for android
past 6months android applications are increased very fast
oops i forgot
so we will have more apps than android and iphone
It’s NOT 2.5 million, it’s 250,000 apps for iPhone and NOT 1 million, but 100,000 apps for android. And yes, android market has gotten about 50,000 more apps in past 3-4 months. It’s crazy! But with Qt on symbian and meego and Meego just being around the corner, I hope OVI store will have more apps that are actually awesome!
actually iphone and android has this huge number of apps because they don’t support flash(since android 2.2). plus a lot of iphone apps are books converted as apps. I hope ovi store will not accept this type of apps, and make me search through millions of crappy applications.
About porting it;s not that easy as you think. yes they show you some small , simple examples, but making a port for a large software may take some time and resources. companies will port their programs only if they see a huge potential in ovi store. Also a lot of applications target US traffic so even if ovi store has a huge number of downloads, they are interested more in the number of downloads for a certain region( US in our case)
Ovi store is what nokia should now work hard on! Dumb people like app and games and are not willing to go somewhere else to look for app and games
What are the selected iphone games and apps that should be ported to nokia platform?
Is it us or the original developers to do this job?