ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt 100.9 is here!

[LucasDanzinger]

We are proud to announce the release of 100.9 of ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt. This release brings to life all of the latest and greatest Runtime functionality mentioned in this blog, along with some notable changes specific to the Qt SDK as well.

Qt 5.15 upgrade

100.9 makes Qt 5.15.0 the minimum Qt version. This version of Qt is much more than a simple upgrade as it brings some major architectural changes, particularly for Android. In previous Qt releases, there were individual Qt kits for each Android architecture that we support (armv7, armv8, and x86). If you wanted to support all 3 architectures for your app, you’d need to perform 3 separate builds and the output would be 3 separate APKs. You would then submit each individual APK to the Google Play Store. Qt 5.15 integrates all the supported Android architectures into one kit, so now you can perform one build and get one output APK or a new AAB (Android Application Bundle) to submit to the Play Store. You can learn more about the technical details of this Qt architectural change in this Qt blog.

Static Methods in QML

One of the major goals of Qt 5.15 is to prepare for Qt 6. One of the ways they are prepping for Qt 6 is by deprecating APIs and functionality they wish to no longer support with the major upgrade. One such change was with QML singleton registrations, which caused some fallout that was described in detail in this blog. With 100.9, the proposed solution that was mentioned in the above blog has come to life, and everything should be fully functional again.

New Toolkit

One of our primary goals for 100.9 was to come up with a new path forward for the open source toolkit. We wanted a better architecture that allowed us to support QML, Qt Quick C++, and Widgets, and to share as much code as possible so that it would be easier for us to maintain and contribute. The outcome from this work is a Toolkit beta which contains the same tool components that are in the current toolkit, but architected using our new design pattern. We will be releasing a blog shortly with more details.

For more details on all this and more, see the Qt SDK Release Notes. We look forward to hearing about your projects and to see what you build.

- ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt Development Team