Mobile phones, tablets, and watches have their platform ways to deploy apps—usually through an app store. Deploying plugins and other libraries needs special attention. In this chapter, we will discuss alternative OSes, such as Jolla's Sailfish OS, as embedded devices have several options. I use a Raspberry Pi as an example for embedded Linux devices.
For the major mobile phone app stores, you will need to digitally sign your package with a security certificate, which the systems use as a way to identify the author enough to trust the application.
A certificate involves a public-private key pair. The private key is just that. You keep that private. The public certificate is publicly distributable. I won't go into the cryptography involved here. Qt Creator calls these certificates the keystore and you can use Qt Creator to generate these self-signed certificates.
We will examine the following deployment targets:
- For Android
- For iOS
- For alternative OSes...