Qt for WebAssembly on mobile devices

Qt for WebAssembly on mobile devices, specifically phones, has lacked an essential feature - support for the native keyboard. It may or may not have worked. If it worked, it did not work very well. The tricky issue is opening the keyboard when needed and closing when it wasn't. There is no simple API for doing that on any platform we target - iOS, Android and Windows.

Although it feels a bit hacky to me to open the keyboard using javascript , we use Emscripten's C++ interface to create a hidden javascript text input element and set focus to that, which opens the platform keyboard.

Emscripten on Android had one other issue - the usual Emscripten input event API was not working. Nothing being typed on the native virtual keyboard was being handled like on other platforms. I found I could utilize the hidden input element that is used to pop up the keyboard, to listen for input characters and then send them to Qt. 

As it is, this patch adds support for native mobile keyboard for iOS, Android and Windows on Qt for WebAssembly. (now merged into dev as 66a76a5def46d0e4a330f7130ad440c639b87cf7), too late to make it into 6.3.

Other issues on mobile are memory (as usual). Up until recently, Safari limits browser memory to much less than the other browsers. 

Other areas that Qt covers for mobile devices that do not work on Qt for WebAssembly yet are sensors and bluetooth connectivity. Although there is a patch for some sensors support, it has not been merged and probably needs updating. It may not work at all, either.

Bluetooth connectivity for javascript is currently only supported on the Chrome browser and is currently experimental. While I could probably add this support to Qt WebAssembly, it would not get merged and the API might be too changey.

Any areas you find Qt WebAssembly is lacking on mobile, please report to https://bugreports.qt.io/

Qt WebAssembly faster builds

Admittedly, building Qt WebAssembly apps takes what seems like forever. Technically, it is the linking part that takes a huge amount of time, as that is where the magic happens.

You may have missed my first blog regarding faster build times for Qt WebAssembly apps:
http://qtandeverything.blogspot.com/2019/06/faster-link-time-for-qt-webassembly.html

Here is how to get set up to use this now integrated feature.

1. You need emscripten with upstream clang, which has support for transpiling directly to wasm, instead of taking the intermediary step of building javascript, then outputting wasm binary with that. Starting with version 1.39.0, upstream clang is the default. You can use "latest" to get 1.39.x or something like "sdk-upstream-1.38.43-64bit" to get an earlier version.

./emsdk install latest
./emsdk activate --embedded latest
source ./emsdk_env.sh

You can then configure and rebuild Qt with  -device-option WASM_OBJECT_FILES=1

configure -xplatform wasm-emscripten -developer-build -nomake tests -nomake examples -opensource -confirm-license -verbose -compile-examples -no-warnings-are-errors -release -device-option WASM_OBJECT_FILES=1

Then you can build your Qt app as normal using the qmake from that build, and watch the build time speed up!

*NOTE* Using  WASM_OBJECT_FILES with a multi-threaded build is still experimental, as both threads and using wasm object files in emscriptem/wasm and Qt are experimental. I have not seen any real issues regarding the use of both of these at the same time.

You can read more about Qt for WebAssembly, mobile and embedded development in the book Hands-On Mobile and Embedded Development with Qt 5