The Basics of Mobile Application Development in Qt

We live in a highly connected world, and mobile applications have long since become a must for modern businesses. Moreover, products, solutions, or services provided without synchronization with software lose out to those that are synced with users’ smartphones.

According the statistics provided by Data.ai, the number of mobile app downloads increased from 140,68 to 230 billion in the period from 2016 to 2021.

Number of mobile app downloads worldwide from 2016 to 2021
(in billions), source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271644/worldwide-free-and-paid-mobile-app-store-downloads/

Mobile applications help businesses be in close connection with their clients and receive feedback from them. Besides, if you use a cross-platform mobile app, you will win a larger audience of clients that use different operating systems.

Nowadays, there are so many tools and frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile applications. The most essential thing in this process is to build a mobile app with a look-and-feel UI/UX design capable of targeting several operating systems and keeping high performance at the same time.

Let’s explore what aspects you should consider while developing a mobile app for your business:

• Target audience. Before formulating your requirements and starting the development, you should get to know and analyze your audience of users. Here, you can include such criteria as their language, interests, location, and behavioral tendencies. This will help you make your mobile app engaging and comfortable for your users.

• UI/UX design. The results of the target audience analysis should be a basis for building an intuitive, friendly, and attractive UI/UX design for the users. Knowledge of your audience’s needs and their feedback can help you increase the engagement and loyalty of the end-users. The result should be a mobile app with a sleek UI/UX design that will provide your customers with easy and efficient interaction with your business.

• Secure data transmission. There are so much sensitive data that your clients can share while using your mobile app. It includes but is not limited to numbers of credit cards, health-related information, personal data, biometrical data, and so on. To protect your clients and their data, you should implement security features in the process of designing your mobile app.

• Improvements and enhancements. This aspect is essential for your mobile app since users’ needs and wishes can change over time. That is why it should be easy to improve and deploy. Another important moment is that your supporting infrastructure should be set properly so your development team can enhance your mobile app without difficulties.

• Choosing the right technology. Half the success of your mobile app development is the right choice of a programming language, framework, and other tools. Here, you should consider what operating systems your clients use and choose the technology that will enable the process of building an app with high-performance and smooth UI/UX design.

Qt – a leading UI and cross-platform framework – can help you implement all these stages. Additionally, using Qt can save your budget since this framework is open-source.

Advantages of using Qt for cross-platform mobile app development

Here are 6 benefits that you can get from Qt and its tools:

1. A cross-platform mobile app with native features. Qt framework allows for targeting various operating systems without changing source code. Thus, it speeds up the development process.

2. Qt is easy to learn. Qt provides developers with strong support. It is documented properly, so a developer can find numerous examples and detailed explanations on how to create functionalities, features, and parts of a mobile application. Besides, there are special community support channels through which developers can get answers to all the questions that may arise in the development process.

3. QML for building responsive UI/UX designs. QML is a part of Qt framework that has JavaScript support. You can control and monitor the appearance and performance of your mobile app through the Qt interface. With the means of QML and other Qt tools, you can design a UI that will keep high performance on several operating systems at once.

4. Building UIs for touchscreens. Qt contains special tools and UI libraries for developing both 2D and 3D designs with various visuals. It allows developers to simulate and work in 3D using various prebuilt shader effects, animations, touch-based inputs, and other instruments.

5. Proper testing process. Qt enables an efficient and comfortable testing process by providing developers with Qt Quick Test framework. With the help of it, you can test your UI by simulating keyboard, touch, and other events.

6. Easy and rapid prototyping. Qt framework enables quick and easy development and validation process. It is possible due to the reusable class libraries and consolidated design and development procedures. A big plus here is that Qt provides options for close collaboration between designers and developers. So, with Qt, it is easy to create a mobile app product from scratch and get it to market thanks to the API tools.

Conclusion

Qt is a mature and large framework that can help you optimize the process of building your cross-platform mobile application. If you chose to use Qt, you can hire one team of developers to create an app that will target several operating systems.