QGIS 3.0 Plans

There will soon be a major change from QGIS 2.x to 3.x. The main reasons are the following:

• The base libraries qt4 and Python 2 have new major versions. The old versions "qt4" (the base of QGIS) are phased out and support for modern operating systems will soon be suspended, in particular on the MacOSX platform. This change from qt4 to qt5 and Python 2 to 3 will be a major challenge for the QGIS project and developers.
• The QGIS-API will be overhauled: several classes and methods could be implemented in a more elegant way. New classes are needed, old classes will be deprecated.
• The use of qt5 will open a lot of new possibilities and features - qt5 contains better graphics functions, widgets, QML, charts and much more.
• Mobile devices are better supported by qt5

It is planned to release a 2.16 version at the end of June 2016, with some improvements and a lot of polishing of existing features. After that, QGIS will be branched and developers will focus mainly on the new 3.x branch. The 2.x and 3.x branch will exist in parallel. Backports from 3.x to 2.x will only happen in exceptional cases, if possible and useful or if demanded by some user who funds the backporting to 2.x

Because both the change from qt4 to qt5 and from Python 2.x to 3.x will demand migration work from plugin authors, the two major steps are bundled in the same release. Version 2.16 will already allow to be compiled with either versions of the library but will still be released with the old libraries. A migration tool based on the Python 2to3 tool (mainly funded from the QGIS user group Switzerland) will assist plugin authors with these efforts.

There is no release date set for QGIS 3.0. There are major challenges to overcome and it is still unclear how long this development work will take. If there are no major stumbling blocks the QGIS project can perhaps release 3.0 in Q1 2017. It would therefore be useful to make 3.2 an LT release, with all 3.0 teething troubles hopefully eliminated.

Please consider these circumstances and the timing if you do contracted QGIS development work in 2016. You can find further thoughts and information on this topic in the QGIS blog entry "QGIS 3.0 plans".