Qt for Android - Building from Source
This page describes the process of configuring and building Qt for Android. To download and install a pre-built Qt for Android, follow the instructions on the Getting Started with Qt page.
Prerequisites
To build Qt for Android from source please ensure all requirements from Getting Started with Qt for Android are met before continuing.
Windows
Building Qt for Android on Windows also requires the following software:
- MinGW 11.2 toolchain
Note: Qt for Android does not support building from source with Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC).
Install the requirements, and set the PATH
to include the newly installed binaries:
set MINGW_ROOT=<MINGW_ROOT_PATH>\bin set PATH=%MINGW_ROOT%;%PATH%
To verify the installation, run:
where mingw32-make.exe
The command should list mingw32-make.exe under the path <MINGW_ROOT> first.
Getting the Sources
You can download the Qt sources from the Qt Downloads page, or follow the wiki guide for Getting the source code.
Configuring
Qt 6 allows building Qt for Android from source code using CMake
. Qt 6 keeps the same configure script from Qt 5. The main difference is that Qt for Android is dependent on a host Qt build, which means to build Qt for Android, you need to build Qt for the desktop platform used as a host (for example Linux, macOS, or Windows).
To configure Qt for Android, create a shadow build directory to keep the source directory clean:
mkdir <path_to_build_dir>/build-qt cd <path_to_build_dir>/build-qt
And then run the configure script:
<path_to_qt_source>/configure -platform android-clang -prefix </path/to/install> -android-ndk $ANDROID_NDK_ROOT -android-sdk $ANDROID_SDK_ROOT -qt-host-path <path_to_host_qt_installation>
Note: configure always uses the Ninja generator and build tool if a ninja
executable is available. Ninja is cross-platform, feature-rich, performant, and recommended on all platforms. The use of other generators might work but is not officially supported.
Architectures
Qt for Android supports the following ABIs:
The following configurations are supported in this Qt release:
Distribution | Architecture | Compiler | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Android 8.0 to Android 13 (API level 26 to API 33) | armeabi-v7a , x86 , arm64-v8 , and x86_64 | Clang 14.0.6 (NDK r25b) as provided by Google | For JDK versions see Java Development Kit (JDK) |
Note: It's recommended that Qt user apps use the same NDK r25b version used for building these official Qt for Android libraries. An NDK version more recent than r23b is required if building a project results in an error of missing the symbols for __emutls_get_address
.
To choose the ABI to build for, use the -android-abis feature of the configure script.
Note: 6.5 does not yet support being built for multiple ABIs at the same time.
Advanced Configure Arguments
Qt for Android contains Java code which is compiled into *.jar files with javac. To set the javac version for source and target, use -android-javac-source and -android-javac-target respectively:
-android-javac-source 8 -android-javac-target 8
To build Qt as a developer build instead of a prefix build, use the following instead of -prefix
argument:
-developer-build
Qt Configure Options contains more information about the configure options.
Building
To build the configured Qt code, run the following command:
cmake --build . --parallel
Installing
Now, to install Qt, run the following command:
cmake --install .
On Unix based OSes you should prefix the install command with the sudo
command.
If you haven't provided the --prefix <install-dir>
configure option, the installation is placed under /usr/local/Qt-<version>
.
© 2023 The Qt Company Ltd. Documentation contributions included herein are the copyrights of their respective owners. The documentation provided herein is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3 as published by the Free Software Foundation. Qt and respective logos are trademarks of The Qt Company Ltd. in Finland and/or other countries worldwide. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.