Qt Group and Qualcomm streamline UI dev for industrial IoT

The combined force of Qt’s cross-platform development tools and Qualcomm Technologies’ means IoT manufacturers could significantly accelerate their devices’ time-to-market.

Qualcomm Technologies, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, has long provided processors for devices in industries spanning smartphones, automobiles, Extended Reality, and IoT. Porting Qt Group’s platform on Qualcomm Technologies’ software significantly streamlines how software vendors develop and test UI solutions with Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced processors. It also greatly increases the ease and speed with which hardware vendors can, at scale, develop Systems on Modules (SoM) – tiny computer systems with ready-made components that can be used to easily create embedded electronic devices (from robots to security cameras).

In addition to these UI capabilities, OEMs accessing Qualcomm Technologies’ processors that support Qt can also access Qt Group’s intuitive, user-friendly software development and quality assurance tools, drastically lowering production barriers for manufacturers.

“When you tune out the noise surrounding tech innovation today, what is it really at the end of the day that impacts end users the most? It’s the user experience – specifically the user interface,” says Roger Mazzella, Senior Product Manager at Qt Group. “At Qt Group, our team has been proud to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies in the automotive industry over the years. Now, we get to expand the benefits of all that groundwork to the IoT market, to which Qualcomm Technologies is well suited. Their high-powered processors handle data-heavy communication while providing ultra-fast performance that developers and end users expect.”

“The benefit of Qt’s technologies is that they already have a history of implementation across 70 industries,” says Juhapekka Niemi, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Qt Group. “We will give hardware and software vendors for IoT the UI/UX development and QA tools they need right out of the box. Since these vendors don’t have to perform any integrations themselves, the ease of developing GUIs significantly cuts down the time it takes to launch their products.”

By leveraging Qt’s development tools and framework, IoT manufacturers can apply advanced 3D graphics capabilities to their device’s UI, except in a much leaner package. Other frameworks, such as game engines, also cater to high-fidelity graphics, but these normally include features that are not necessary for creating GUIs on IoT devices. Since the Qt framework instead tailors its features to these IoT devices, developers can build and run the UIs on far lower hardware requirements.

“At Qualcomm Technologies, we strongly believe in building an industry ecosystem that allows manufacturers to create excellent hardware and software solutions for vertical markets using our chipsets,” says Manvinder Singh, Vice President of Strategy and Partner Solutions Development of IoT, Qualcomm Technologies. “This collaboration gives developers a ready-made solution to build their creative solutions on top of.”

Qt Group’s tools for designing, developing, and assuring the quality of products aim to promote closer alignment between developers and designers, streamlining workflows by letting them work simultaneously within the same framework. The tools are ideal for cross-platform development, particularly for low-powered and embedded devices.