Qt 6.12 is the new five-year LTS, built around the EU Cyber Resilience Act
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe Qt Company has released Qt 6.12, the framework's new long-term support version. Qt LTS releases arrive every two years and receive maintenance over a five-year period; the company stresses that consecutive LTS lines overlap, so products can move from one to the next on a planned schedule.
The headline of the release is regulation. The announcement says Qt 6.12 is built to meet the requirements of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, whose obligations it expects to take full effect in December 2027, and that the commercial edition is compliant now. It says the release ships without known exploitable vulnerabilities, with a new vulnerability disclosure process, guaranteed response times for commercial customers, security-critical code marked in the source, and a commitment to integrate current third-party libraries.
On the technical side, the hot-reload mechanism is now built into the QML engine, giving a live preview of running QML code while it is edited. Qt Canvas Painter, a new accelerated imperative painting engine, leaves technical preview and gains a QML Canvas2D type; it also speeds up Qt Graphs. A StyleKit for consistent styling across Widgets and Qt Quick arrives in Labs. QRangeModel gets built-in sorting, drag-and-drop control and faster search, and QtGrpc adds client-side message compression and limits on incoming message size.
Qt 6.12 also adds HarmonyOS as an officially supported LTS platform, with the same stability and maintenance guarantees as Qt's other major platforms.
Why it matters
For teams selling devices or desktop software in the EU, the CRA turns "which framework version do we ship" into a compliance question. A five-year LTS that the vendor states is built for the regulation gives those teams a fixed base to plan against.