With the development of Libhandy, it seems to me that GTK now really looks amazing on mobile devices.
I also heard that GTK 4 is going to use Google’s ANGLE for rendering. Can anyone tell if there are any plans to distribute GTK 4 to Android mobile devices and what ways of development does this direction have?
(I also found a mention of Android in this post. )
Thanks to CSS, I don’t think the native look can be a problem.
PS Just read this thread, which also has a checkbox over android and ios when mentioning Vulkan.
Mobile apps are now more popular than ever, and only GTK has bindings for literally all, especially native languages. So I think this can greatly increase the popularity of GTK in General.
Only on Windows, as it may be the only semi-reliable GL implementation available there.
No, there are no plans, and nobody is working on that, to the best of the GTK team’s knowledge.
Targeting Android is not trivial, especially for GUI applications. It’s even worse for iOS. I would never recommend using anything that tried to reimplement Android’s or iOS’s UI toolkits and drawing directly on a windowing system surface; my suggested approach would be something like Xamarin’s, with a generic API that gets compiled for each platform and turned into platform-native widgets. Alternatively, writing your business logic without any toolkit, and then having different UIs for different platforms.
No, it really would not.
Established mobile platforms come with their own platform toolkits and libraries for a reason, and it takes a lot less to retrain (or hire) people on different platforms than it takes to write a toolkit that abstracts them all away, poorly.
I know that some people use Qt for that, but it’s pretty clear that Qt is not making any inroads in those areas, and it’s mostly niche free software apps that use it.
GTK as a multiplatform GUI for applications, as many other, will have issues running on a GUI OS not providing a muti-GUI layer, this is true for Windows and OSX; they are designed for force it’s developers targeting it; to use it’s AP; I and convince them to just use it’s tools; so is possible to create a controlled ecosystem.
Let’s say we will see Wayland on Android, Windows and OSX, the issue will be to have a compositor able to run on, that will help you, the app developer, to create your GUI targeting multi-platforms. That is not going to happen, unless the GUI OS vendors cooperate to create a common ecosystem of applications and tools, deprecating their’s own and be flexible on how the applications provide an user feel and experience, something specially more hard to see on iOS.
Open platforms, like Librem’s phone, can be efforts to provide that common tools and stack. It’s a war against Google, Apple and Microsoft; all they earn lot of money on their platforms and tools. Google is opening more and more options and it it similar company can provide such a platform will be a great success. Let’s see how is this going on.
Libhandy is a good effort to provide a tool for developers to create applications targeting both Mobile and Desktop GUI applications, optimizing the time and money required to deploy your application to both platforms. That is the advantage provided to Android, for example.