What are the current strong points of GTK for Android over Qt for Android?
In 2020, for example, @ebassi thought Qt was niche, and it sounds like the goal of GTK for Android would be to run GNOME apps rather than to be a cross-platform (GUI) toolkit:
However, is there some reason for a two-platform developer (iOS/Android) to be currently interested in GTK for Android? According to charts such as:
Qt might still be a bit unpopular, but it seems far more robust than, for example, Flutter, which is immensely popular for commercial apps. Some support for this, for example,
Most of the time, using a different toolkit rather than the platform specific one is used to provide a cross-platform app. Qt (not counting nokia phones) in phones today is mostly used by KDE to make their apps available on android from what I can see. Alternative frameworks are also used to ease development or to allow developers to use a framework or language they’re already good in. GTK seems like it would go well on android with the new Adwaita and it’s convergence but with all the frameworks we already have, I dont think that GTK would stand out or it is worth the effort to port GTK to Android just for it to be used by some small applications.
While this (@mirkok above) is just one answer, then it already supports the idea I had, which is that Qt could fit into GTK development, even when some people in the GTK project may seem to view it as not relevant.
I think it could be relevant for the GNOME project also to consider how Qt apps behave in GNOME or GTK. It may sound dumb since GTK already enables apps on GNOME, but, OTOH, a big problem is that a lot of projects that will still rely on Qt for cross-platform apps would not want their apps to break on GNOME, which is still the default DE in major GNU/Linuxes. I also think that this belongs more under the GNOME project than under Qt, which is a “guest framework” on GNOME. However, I have not been able to find “Qt on GTK” projects or the sorts.
Then, if one thinks that GTK should extend to resemble Qt, we are left with the thread’s question again. At this point, I think the KDE project has made a much better decision in adapting Qt as the default DE, but this is another topic.
How would “Qt on GTK project” look like? Those two are toolkits and not desktops. It’s toolkit’s job to integrate nicely with the desktop, not the other way.
And answering your original question: both GTK and Qt on Android are incredibly niche. They are there mostly because someone wanted to work on them and they are mostly for desktop apps that would want to extend to Android. For Android-first apps there are more comfy options (tho its pretty subjective and def depends on the developer).
And GNOME adopted GTK because at the time, Qt wasn’t really free software, that’s why the founders took GIMP’s toolkit and decided to do their own thing, but entirely made of free software
