Nokia to let go Qt ownership

Nokia would abnegate the ownership of Qt, a cross-platform C++ application framework, shortly. Nokia would comply byopen-governance and would remain as 'Maintainers of Qt', said Kalle Karkas, head of Operator Marketing, Nokia, Finland at the third edition of the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 held in Bangalore today. Nokia would continue to invest in Qt and it has been recruiting people in this arena. He added that Nokia is not porting Qt to other platform but the company intends to focus on the developers community.

This move would be beneficial to both Qt and Nokia. Kalle Karkas added that Qt would become more popular and it is active and growing. It will offer more opportunities for Qt experts and brings apps to next billion.

He reiterated that Nokia will focus on Symbian OS and provide upgradations on Symbian platform until 2016. He pointed out that there were 200K apps downloads in 2008 and there has been 2 billion downloads in 2011 despite the change in Nokia's strategy, its partnership with Microsoft on Smart devices.

Qt originated in Norway and it had been an open-source platform from past 15 years. The latest releases of Qt apps were 4.7.4 launched in September, 4.8 launched in July 2011 and it would be available for public in late this year. Qt 5.0 along with Quick 3D would be launched in 2012.

During the conference, Miikka Nevasalo, director, Series 40 Developer Experience reiterated that Nokia is working very hard on monetizing the apps. He said, there can be increase in the revenue on apps by enhancing the customer experience. An app developer would gain anywhere better 30-50 Euros per month. In order to monetize on apps, Nokia offers 'In Application purchaser' and 'In App Advertising' to the developers.