Exciting news for the developer community today, and in particular for those who are focused on Qt: At the Nokia Connection 2011 event in Singapore, Nokia Senior Vice President, Developer Experience Marco Argenti confirmed that Nokia will “make Qt core to bringing applications to the next billion,” and he reassured developers that investments made in Qt today will live on in the future with Nokia.

During his presentation, “Qt and the Next Billion”, Argenti noted the following:

• “Qt-powered Apps have serious momentum on Ovi Store. Our consumers are downloading more Qt-written apps on over 100 million devices worldwide. And today I’m happy to announce that we will make Qt core to bringing great applications to the next billion.”
• “Why did we pick Qt? Qt is a great cross-platform framework. Qt is modern and efficient. Qt Quick bridges the design phase with the production phase – making it incredibly easy to design, prototype and develop new applications. With QML, the interface markup language, web developers can feel right at home creating great UI’s.”
• “Qt is widely supported by an active community of over 1/2 million developers. And Nokia will continue to invest in Qt, as we’ve recently released Qt SDK 1.1, and we’re actively involved in contributing to Qt 5.”

This means developers will have both a large existing audience to target with Qt-based mobile apps (100 million Symbian-based phones, plus our first-ever pure touch smartphone, the Nokia N9).

Argenti also noted that: “We will disclose further details in due time; today we want our developers to see the opportunity that the future of Qt brings as part of our mobile phones strategy.”

Learn more about developing for the Nokia N9 and developing with Qt.