The new version of Qt has been released with support for mobiles.

Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework for developers using C++ or QML, a CSS and JavaScript-like language. It lets you write cross-platform applications, so you create a single code base with apps that work well on platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

The new release adds support for developing mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Sailfish/Jolla and Ubuntu Mobile.

Announcing the new version on the Qt blog, Lars Knoll said:

“With the release of Qt 5.1 in July, we showcased the Qt for Android and iOS ports and laid down the beginning of some heavy improvements we have now done on Qt’s graphics capabilities.”

The advantage of the new mobile support is that Qt developers can now take their existing desktop or embedded applications and bring them to mobile phones or tablets.

This video shows you how to get started with QT Mobile:

A technical preview of Qt for WinRT has also been made available, and as this is based on the development branch of Qt, it already contains some of the new features that will be included in Qt 5.3.

While the majority of the Qt APIs are supported in the new version, Qt WebKit isn’t supported in this version on Android, and won’t be made available for iOS because of App Store policies. Recognising the drawback this represents, the team at Qt Digia is working an alternative way to embed web content via Qt APIs to Android and iOS in future versions. Qt Bluetooth and Qt NFC are also not yet supported and will be implemented in a subsequent release.

While the mobile support is the headline improvement, work has also been done in other areas. More than 1500 bugs have been fixed since the release of Qt 5.1.1, and the desktop platforms have been improved. Qt Quick Controls for the desktop have been improved so it’s easier to integrate Qt Quick into traditional QWidget-based applications, and it’s easier to deal with user configurable key bindings thanks to the addition of a new QKeySequenceEdit QWidget class.

Developers targeting Windows and Mac platforms can use Extras modules that make it possible to integrate with native code on Windows and Mac. There’s improved time zone and locale support with QTimeZone and QCollator, and Bluetooth is supported for Linux with Qt Bluetooth module.

The blog post explains that a things have also changed under the hood. Specifically, the QML module has a new engine that removes the dependency on the V8 JavaScript engine. The new engine supports an interpreted mode, so can run on CPU architectures where JIT would not be available or platforms such as iOS where JIT’ing is not allowed by App Store policies.

Qt Quick, the technologies that let you interact with user interfaces on devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and other portable devices, has also been improved, with faster rendering that frees up more CPU time for the application itself. There’s also a new animation type called Animator that lets you run many animations fully on the rendering thread, so avoiding them being blocked even if the main thread is heavily loaded.

Qt WebKit has also received a major update now being based on a WebKit version from this summer. This includes many new features such CSS Blending, Geolocation, Web Notifications and a threaded garbage collector.