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Comment by seba_dos1

2 years ago

Maemo 5 (N900) and earlier were Gtk based, although PR1.2 update of Maemo 5 made Qt a first-class citizen, so you could use it to develop for N900. The UI (Hildon) stayed Gtk and worked pretty well.

Harmattan (Maemo 6 branded as MeeGo that shipped with N9) was Qt based from the start. Gtk wasn't officially supported at all there, although some support has been brought over by the community.

Also, I guess you have never actually used Qtopia? I did. It wasn't really a great base to build a smartphone platform on. It made a great feature phone though, and was a pretty nice demonstration platform for Qt Embedded. Nokia didn't have Qtopia until they brought Trolltech, which happened after several versions of Maemo were already shipped in working products.

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seba_dos1

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zxspectrum1982  2 years ago

I did use Qtopia. I found it a lot better than Symbian, and it was available. Nokia should have scrapped Maemo the moment they acquired Trolltech and rebase it on top of Qtopia. E. g. by adding X11 compatibility, if that's what they wanted to make ports of Linux applications easier. Nokia was essentially crawling with Maemo while Android and iOS where already walking. By the time Nokia walked with the N9, Android and iOS where running.

The burning platform memo was the worst of all: lots and lots of mobile app developers intended to develop for Maemo as the third platform because Nokia was still a huge leader and they trusted Nokia. The moment Elop announced Nokia was shifting to Windows Phone, with phones months away, and no possibility of reusing any code from another platform (only .NET allowed, no way to reuse any C/C++ base they were sharing on Android and iOS), that was the moment everybody dropped Nokia. Suicide.