Bogdan Vatra

Reverse engineering in general is a tricky business and sometimes not very orthodox. So, why bother to write this article? Well, sometimes reverse engineering is also for something good. It started when my wife dusted off her watch. We had a huge unpleasant surprise when we found that the companion app is not available anymore […]

In this article, I'd like to talk about Android storage. In recent Android versions, Google decided, for a good reason, to restrict the access to the SD card. This means, even if your application will have the old READ/WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions declared and granted, you won't be able to freely access the SD Card contents like […]

It is our pleasure to introduce a shiny new Maps & Navigation solution for QML developers! This QML plugin is a joint effort between KDAB & Magic Lane (formerly General Magic) to bring the excellent General Magic Maps and Navigation SDK to the QML world. What makes the General Magic QML plugin special? It's easy to use. With […]

As you already know KDAB is the largest independent contributor to Qt code. Of course we didn't get lazy and we've added a lot of cool stuff to Qt 5.14. In this article I'm going to write about the super cool stuff that we've added to Qt 5.14 for Android. Android multi arch build in […]

Each month KDAB schedules time for me to maintain the Qt for Android port. Usually I use it to review the pending patches or fix bugs, but sometimes there is a quiet month and I have time to add new functionalities or improve the existing ones. April was quite quiet so I decided to rewrite […]

Santa Claus is coming to ... wait a minute, it's not Christmas yet! Status update: The patch was merged into master branch on Mar 6th, therefore it will be part of QtCreator 4.10(5.0?) not 4.9! I have the pleasure to let you know that KDAB has contributed to Qt with yet another super cool project! […]

While I was working on a yet-to-be-announced super secret and cool Qt on Android project, I had to do a lot of debugging. This way I found that debugging Qt apps on Android using QtCreator was ok, but it had some issues, which was kinda frustrating. First issue was that I could not debug on […]

Android Things is Google’s answer to creating an environment for IoT devices. Take a slimmed down Android build, add some sensor-specific APIs, and provide it on a number of powerful pre-integrated micro-boards and you have a ready-made platform for building a host of upcoming IoT devices. Android Things can take advantage of many existing Android […]

In this session we'll see real life examples of using JNI on Android. We'll start by checking the Qt 5.7 goodies which will make our lives easier, then we'll see simple examples that you'll need to use in almost any Qt on Android application, and we'll end up with an Android Service made with Qt. […]

Starting with Qt 5.7, we added the ability to create Android services using Qt. In this article we're going to see how to get started and also how to communicate between the two. Before we get started I want to add a big bold WARNING about the performance! Because the services are run in the […]

Some time ago, I wrote a code to restart the running application on Android. You might well ask why such a thing was needed. It was needed because there are cases where, whenever a user changes the theme, the application has to restart to apply the change (it can't be applied on the fly). In […]

To get you started on this, we'll be using KDAB's Android utils with the humble Toast. Toasts are small popups which are used to show the user some feedback. Check Google's API guide for more info about toasts. The easiest way to show a toast is to use Toast.makeText(Context context, CharSequence text, int duration) static […]

Sometimes we need to exchange images from Android world to Qt world and vice-versa, therefore in this article we're going to see how to convert a QImage to an Android Bitmap and how to convert an Android bitmap and an Android Drawable into a QImage. To get access to Android Bitmap data & info we're […]

Motivation: Android SurfaceTexture is used by all Android classes that need to display (a lot of) frames, it can be used to display media player, camera, etc. You can also use it in combination with other players: OpenMAX, VLC, etc. (well, VLC and other C++ player are using MediaCodec) to decode the images directly to […]

I'd like to start a new series of Qt on Android articles, these will be small articles which will focus on useful features that you'll need on Android but which don't have any Qt API (yet). I'll start with two pretty useful functions. These functions will help us to run C++ code directly on Android […]

Update: Here you have also the Chinese version, thanks goes to Foruok. In the last two Qt on Android episodes we learned how to use basic JNI on Android and how to use an external IDE to easily manage the Java part. In this episode, it is time to move forward and focus on extending […]

Update: Here you have also the Chinese version, thanks goes to Foruok. In the last Qt on Android episode we learned the basics of JNI on Android in a Qt way. In this episode I'd like to focus on tools that will help us to be more productive when we extend our Qt on Android […]

Qt on Android Tutorial (please adjust volume / low sound): Abstract: The tutorial will start with instructions on how to setup the development environment, how to configure QtCreator and ensuring that all dependencies are met. It will then continue with a live demonstration on creating an app, deploying it to an Android device and debugging […]

AKA: I know what you did last Christmas ! Hello folks, I'd like to share with you a few things that I did during this Xmas. Besides the fact I'll never ever take a vacation before Xmas, because Brasov is a tourist attraction and it was FULL of tourists in that period. I could ski […]

Update: Here you have also the Chinese version, thanks goes to Foruok. After we've seen how to set up the development environment, how to use Qt on Android and what deployment systems are available and how to sign the final package, it's time to move forward. In this article we are going to learn about […]