If the license of the device is shady then it's not a qt problem. If they do major breaking changes then qt should abstract over them and alleviate the problem.

We should remember that "development frameworks" were not even allowed in the early days of iOS [1]. That we can use them now is a huge step forward. But at the same time, little prevents companies like Apple from throwing the switch back for new apps.

[1] https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Quoting from [1]:

> We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

What many forget when quoting iOS victory about Flash, is that Adobe was quick to adapt and offer AOT compilation for Flash.

So many of the casual games in iOS kept being Flash, before Unity and Cocos got enough uptake.

This seems to be a quote taken out of context. Apple wasn't against third party frameworks as a rule — plenty of third party libraries and tools popped up, especially for allowing languages other than ObjC to be used effectively on iOS.

The message in Thoughts On Flash wasn't about third party libraries wholesale; it was refuting the expectation that Apple should special-case Flash, a technology that never ran acceptably on Android and was quickly deprecated, never mind on iOS.

> license for that kind of devices is quite shady

Would you please describe what exactly is shady in the licensing for someone looking at Qt?

My bigger issue is that they are inflexible with their licenses for small businesses. Either you use LGPL, which requires copyleft on bundled mobile apps (I believe) or you pay based on the total revenue of your business, no matter how small the app is, as told by Michael Dominick on the Coder Radio podcast. Can be quick expensive if you want to launch a new product line, as Mike did. He decided to rewrite his app in C# and AvaloniaUI for Windows/Linux cross platform support.

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

> that they have a clear history to do major breaking changes at each major release

This is a major issue for me.

> Either you use LGPL, which requires copyleft on bundled mobile apps (I believe)

LGPL never enforced any copyleft to something linked on it. This is a wrong, unfortunately common misconception.

> LGPL never enforced any copyleft to something linked on it. This is a wrong, unfortunately common misconception.

Please read my comment carefully. I never said 'linked'.

> Please read my comment carefully. I never said 'linked'.

"bundle" does not change anything, you still do not need copyleft on your app.