It has been well-over a year since the last post and a lot have changed.
Stockona lives on to expand to cover Symbian as well, and is now a lot more mature than it was a year ago. But the natural question for me (and I guess for every Qt developers) is, where should I go next?
At the start of 2012, it looked very much like Nokia's Meltemi and BlackBerry were two viable options. Then Meltemi got canceled when it was in last stage of development. BB also looked shaky and didn't guarantee longer-term platform stability. (At that time rumors flied that BB might consider WP8 as well.) The first half of the year really looked dark in terms of Qt mobile development. All of a sudden, Jolla appeared out of nowhere and the Mer/Nemo Mobile initiative suddenly made a lot of sense. Blackberry also reaffirmed their determination to weather through the launch of BB10 and here we are, waiting for both companies to launch their first Qt phones.
The Jolla story has been vague for now, they said very little except existing Harmattan app will almost instant work on Jolla devices. My guess is that Jolla will have their own Qt components so developers only need to change the import and re-compile. This sounds like music but the problem for Jolla is of course they have to gain market share from zero.
At this point, BB10 seems to be a better bet. It has a large user base and I think many current iPhone/Android users have owned Blackberry at one time. With major operators offering the devices, I think BB10 will be reasonably successful. The one problem I see with BB10 the UI might be too abstract and complicated that more novice users (iPhone users...) will have a steep initial learning curve getting used to the wide array of gestures and different menus/toolbars in the UX.
Development-wise, BB10 has its own IDE and seems like BB only intends to provide some of the Qt components (e.g. Dialog, sheet) but not the full suite of Qt components in their own version. It is a shame, because I think Qt component is such a good initiative to ease UI development for individual developers. I started learning BB10's Cascade and so far it looks like the porting is reasonably doable. The pagestack navigation concept is almost equivalent to Cascade's navigation panel. Many Harmattan Qt component have equivalent ones in Cascade. One useful component that is missing is the SelectionDialog, but I won't complain about such minor issue. The real pain for me is to use BB10 IDE. The interface is plain ugly. The BB10 simulator just doesn't work for me and without a simulator I cannot test UI and see how to customize BB10 UI concept to fit into Stockona's need. The situation is similar to when I started working on Harmattan version, just that at least QtSDK has Qt Designer to at least see UI mockup. I am attending next week's Blackberry Jam developer conference, and hope I got the answer and also got an Alpha device to work on.
In summary, I guess my plan is as simple as wherever Qt goes and I go....
