Qt Customer Survey 2017

Towards the end of every year, we ask you to participate in the Qt Customer Survey. We do this to get a better understanding of your Qt use, satisfaction, and engagement.

Every year you give us helpful insights – insights we need to make better decisions. By learning more about how you use Qt and how you interact with Qt, it allows us to improve on both the product itself and how we provide customer service. We strive to better understand your likes and dislikes and identify areas where we need to make improvements – we would like to sincerely thank you for taking part in that. We are especially thankful to see a lot of valuable input to our RnD via feedback in the comment sections.

As we were analyzing and digesting your feedback, we thought it’d be interesting to share some findings with you already.

What industries are you in?

This was not an easy one to analyze – you’re using Qt for developing desktop and mobile applications, embedded systems and headless devices used on Earth and beyond, in more than 70 industries. Your use cases span from software development kits (SDK), enterprise applications, game development tools, robotics, smart homes and factories, test and measurement systems, consumer goods, automotive, healthcare lab equipment, security systems, digital TVs, and much more. In short – we’re excited to see you put Qt to such a wide use!

What is your biggest win with Qt? (Brag alert!)

‘’Ability to target multiple platforms from the same codebase - blows customers minds every time.’’

’’I feel like I hired a whole department of programming teams working for me.’’

’’Big automotive manufacturer was really happy with the results and expressed: "Is this done with Qt“. Several projects delivered quickly and with appealing results.’’

’’Our biggest win was the ability to migrate our 20+ years old C++ codebase from MFC to something _really_ modern in a continuous and quite straightforward way, improving also the development process as an additional benefit.’’

’’Impressing the bosses with a nice product that is pretty snappy and has great graphics compared to what is on the market.’’

’’With Qt, I have the flexibility to work as I need to. Qt does not lock me into anything and plays well with the "rest of the world". I just wish it were the other way around as well.’’

’’Being able to give customers access to a full-fledged webbrowser/HTML5 experience within our product’’

’’Simultaneous Win/Mac product releases.  Modern browser js frontend talking to Qt backend.’’

’’Clean, simple API and it's fun to work with!’’

Support for highly tailored use cases

Seems like you find some development goals more difficult to achieve than others. We provide support for several operating systems and hardware configurations, but many of you like to push the limits further. We get it, we love to play as well! Share your goals with us, chances are we’ve cleared your roadblocks many times before. We’ll get out shovels, put our backs into it and get you right back on track.

What about learning resources?

We’re happy to learn that our documentation continues to be the trusted source of information for you. However, seems like we still have some work to do on helping you use all the best practices with Qt. We've taken your point, and there's something already in preparation – stay tuned for more tutorials, live and on-demand webinars and the local Qt events and meetups!

What about Qt Widgets?

A lot of you have asked us about the development of Qt Widgets. Since August 2017, the maintainership of Widgets has been transferred back to The Qt Company. This is a signal that we plan to put more resources on widgets going forward, and increase the activity level around the module in general. Rather than seeking to implement new features, the focus will be to access the already large database of bug reports and suggestions in Jira, and get the bug count down. This includes both writing patches internally, but also being more active accepting and reviewing patches from the community. With good help from the latter, we already managed to close around 250 tasks since last summer.

Showing gratitude

To show our appreciation for taking time to help us become better, we've had a small raffle with a few gadgets thrown in for you to pick. The winners are now informed, and the items are on their way! Hope you will enjoy your Bose QC35 headphones and Polar A370 fitness watches!