What role for Qt?

The future of Qt in relation to Tizen is uncertain. It was not mentioned in any of today’s press releases. The Tizen website does make reference to a native development, but does not provide any further details. Instead HTML 5 is promoted as the development environment of choice and in an elastic piece of thinking is given as the reason for the need to evolve MeeGo.

However, Qt is a key component in many MeeGo related projects (e.g. part of the reference design for the GENIVI alliance for IVI devices) and, as noted above, Intel have indicated that there will be backwards compatibility with existing MeeGo netbook applications.

It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.

In our opinion the likely scenario is that Qt will continue to play a major role in Tizen projects, but it will not be promoted as part of the core primary developer environment. Qt may be included as part of the default offering or it may be left to integrators to provide a version of Tizen with Qt. A possible example of how this might work in practise comes from Nomovok, who today released a press statement indicating that they would provide a version of Tizen integrated with Qt as part of their Steelrat system.