TechRadar Pro went to the recent Qt World Summit event, which brought together software developers from all over the world to discuss the ins and outs of designing, building, and testing the next generation of digital products.
At the conference, Qt announced it is expanding its ecosystem, introducing Qt bridges to ‘horizontalize’ its platform even further – and we spoke to Qt’s SVP of product Juhapekka Niemi to find out more about what they do.
At the summit, plenty of product showcases demonstrate all the use-cases for Qt built platforms, ranging from medical monitoring displays, to aggregate mining equipment. Being built with Qt, these have a pretty similar looking display – smooth, sleek, and user-friendly interfaces tie them all together.
Productivity goals
In Qt’s 30 years, the software development framework has evolved almost unrecognizably – but Qt’s end goal hasn’t changed – and that’s helping software developers be more productive across all stages of design, development, and deployment.
“We’re not here just developing software,” explains Juha Varelius, Qt’s CEO.
“Our purpose of course is to make our users and our customers to be more successful, more efficient as they go forward, as the world gets more complex, and to make sure that our customers are very successful.”
And successful customers are not hard to find for Qt. In fact, 8 of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies trust Qt technology with their development tools – and over a million software developers around the world choose Qt’s cross-platform framework to build powerful software for any operating system and device.
“And the next generation is just getting started,” says Niemi. “We have 35,000 developers learning more stuff in Qt Academy. We have 55,000 educational licenses used in classrooms around the world, and many, many, more in other channels learning Qt.”
Modernizing the framework
At the event, Qt announced the end of life of Qt 5.15 – with the last patch set to be released soon, and extended security and maintenance offerings from there onwards.
That brings us to Qt 6.9 – the latest version of Qt’s framework, and one highly compatible with Qt 5 to enable a smooth migration for developers.
“Qt 6.9 today offers the industry’s widest support of operating systems and the latest version of those operating systems and new hardware versions. Qt Creator 16 ushers a new area of productivity and AI-powered software development” Niemi explained.
This comes alongside the expansion of the Qt ecosystem and platform with Qt Bridges to enable developer teams to work in parallel in feature building, including with a new Figma to Qt plug-in.
To keep up with evolutions in computing, Qt’s open tools and open framework strategies help make developers “more interoperable than ever.”
“On the tooling side, we know that developers prefer their own tools – and again, that’s a great thing for us. We want to ensure that whatever IDE you choose, Qt development can be seamless or effortless. Whether it’s Visual Studio Code, CLion, or any IDE that can speak QML through the language server protocol” Niemei promises.
Embracing the fragmentation
It’s difficult to talk about tech without addressing the current political landscape. A somewhat tumultuous climate brings fierce competition in the tech space – especially given large customer bases in both the western world and its current largest adversary – China.
“Due to these political tensions and trade wars, we are starting to see a big technology divide happening between the Western world and China,” Niemi explains. But Qt is prepared;
“You already see these new technology ecosystems emerging very, very quickly in the Chinese market. Some of the software platforms are based on Linux, so Qt can run there. There are new UI paradigms and multimodal interfaces where AI is playing a role.”
DeepSeek, an AI model built and developed in China, has helped cement China’s place as one of the global leaders in digital technologies.
In fact, China has already spent billions of dollars building data centres for AI and compute so far, and it doesn’t look likely to slow down any time soon.
China’s turbulent relationship with the current Trump administration furthers a splintered tech world, making collaboration more difficult. But Qt is committed to servicing its customers all around the world,
“So unfortunately the fragmentation will continue and accelerate. We at Qt, we embrace this fragmentation. Because at the core promise of Qt, write once, deploy everywhere, this is our responsibility to help you address this fragmentation,” assures Niemi.
“We believe that the technology should be a safe bet, not just for today, but for the future. We are working very hard to try to understand where the world is going with the help of you, so we can build these technologies into Qt, and they’re ready there when you need them.”
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