- Qt 6.5
- Qt for Android - Building from Source
- Qt 6.5.0 Reference Documentation

Getting Started with Qt for Android ◦ Qt for Android - Building User Projects

# 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 or later (API level 26 or higher) | `armv7a`, `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>`.

Getting Started with Qt for Android ◦ Qt for Android - Building User Projects