Do you think the commercial version of Qt would have covered what you needed? I would also be interested I'd anyone else here is in a position to compare Xamarin and Qt. It's very hard to compare the two from the outside. Thanks.
Xamarin provides a managed runtime environment (Mono) and a way to call native iOS and Android APIs from that environment. Xamarin Forms builds on top of those things to provide a cross-platform UI toolkit that uses the native controls on each platform.
Qt is a cross-platform GUI toolkit that draws its own controls using each platform's low-level graphics facilities. As such, the controls in a Qt-based application aren't fully native to each platform. Qt tries to mimic the native controls, but the emulation isn't completely faithful. A particular problem is accessibility for users with disabilities, e.g. blind users who need to use a screen reader. Last time I checked (several months ago), Qt didn't implement the accessibility APIs for iOS or Android at all.
Because of the non-native nature of Qt, I would strongly recommend avoiding it in favor of something like Xamarin or RubyMotion.
Thanks for that. The application I'm looking at has a very specialized ui. The functionality also counts for much more than native look and feel from the customers point of view so Qt might still be a runner.
On my case, I wanted to make use of the native file pickers, which only became available in Qt 5.4 via QML (not C++)[0] for Android, with iOS and WP8 support still coming.
Granted, on Android's case the pickers are only available as of version 4.4, but they are available and it is also possible to use intents for lower versions and vender specific pickers.
On my specific case, I came to the conclusion that writing my own JNI layer would be less trouble than debugging Qt. However note that for me this is just hobby development, whenever I feel like coding for it.
Compared to Xamarin, The Qt Company seems to still be searching on what platform integration to sell to companies and how.
