Coming only six months after the release of Qt 5.4, Qt 5.5 fixes almost 1500 reported bugs and adds new features, while also ensuring that it will be ready for Windows 10 on time, improving Linux compatibility and OS X parity.
Among new functionality introduced with Qt 5.5:
- the Bluetooth LE API is now final and supported on Android, OS X, and iOS.
- Qt Canvas 3D enables the use of WebGL code from within Qt Quick, Qt application framework. It can also be used in conjunction with JavaScript libraries such as three.js.
- Qt 3D 2.0 improves Qt support for OpenGL, although it is still considered technology preview. On Windows, Qt 3D will switch from using the OpenGL driver directly to the ANGLE emulation layer, which provides OpenGL on top of DirectX.
- Qt Location support mapping, geocoding, routing, etc. to create location-aware apps.
- Qt Multimedia add support for gstreamer 1.0 on Linux. Furthermore, it improves camera support and integration of external frameworks such as OPenCL or CUDA.
- Qt WebEngine now is up to date with Chromium 40 and provides new APIs to manage file download, cache and cookies, and settings.
- Improved support for OS X, including the replacement of OpenSSL through Apple’s Secure Transport layer, support for Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE, and many fixes.
Qt 5.5 also deprecates a few modules that have been replaced by newer ones. Those are Qt WebKit, replaced by QtWebEngine; Qt Quick 1, replaced by Qt Quick; and Qt Script, replaced by Qt QML.
Together with the new functionality, Qt 5.5 also brings a simplified licensing model including three flavours:
- Qt for application development: the commercial offering that includes full support and flexible licensing.
- Qt for device creation: another commercial offering aimed at the embedded device arena.
- Qt Open Source: LGPL or GPL licensed version.
A full list of changes can be found on Qt wiki.