Digia announces "The Qt Company", launches a unified Web site and unleashes a EUR20 Indie Mobile monthly subscription plan

Digia announced that it has formed "The Qt Company", a wholly owned subsidiary, to drive forth Qt development and market expansion. Under The Qt Company, a brand new Qt product site, www.qt.io is launched unifying the commercial business and open source community under one online channel. A new EUR20 Indie Mobile monthly subscription plan is also unleashed targeting mobile app developers with a commercially-licensed flexible and affordable package for mobile app development and deployment to the most popular stores.

"Qt has been a driving force in Digia's international product business and in the past few years we have seen tremendous growth in the number of new customers where industry leaders have standardised their technology vision on Qt, but most notably in the number of worldwide downloads. With The Qt Company as a separate organisational entity, we feel there is even a greater potential for great success and growth for Qt where we can focus 100% and invest on Qt product and business development as well as geographic expansion," said Juha Varelius, Digia, CEO.

Qt's ecosystem of developers, now estimated to be over 800 000, has seen exponential growth since the December 2013 Qt 5.2 release and introduction of its Qt for Android and iOS ports. Within just six weeks of launch, Qt 5.2 was downloaded 500 000 times, bringing it to a total of over one million downloads four months after release. This has been followed by a successful July release of Qt 5.3 with another one million downloads measured just over a month after launch.

To unify the vibrant ecosystem of Qt developers and companies under one roof, the new www.qt.io Web site becomes the official Qt digital communication channel driven by The Qt Company where both free community and various commercial packages can be downloaded. The new Web site serves as the gateway for all things Qt catering to both developers and companies looking to learn about, try and buy Qt.

In response to ecosystem demands, the new EUR20 Indie Mobile package, targeted at hobby developers and small companies with revenues under EUR100K, includes a commercial licence and full commercial development and deployment rights to the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Windows Marketplace.

The next major release, Qt 5.4, is slated to release before year-end and as announced on 20 August, the Qt open source licence has been changed to include GNU LGPLv3.