The first beta of Qt 5.13.0 has arrived, albeit a month later than originally planned, with the final release candidate slated for the first week of May.

Tuukka Turunen, senior vp for R&D at the Qt Company, said in a blogpost that fans can expect further updates of the C++ library “regularly until we are ready for RC.” This is due on May 7, with the final release slated for May 21

“I hope you will now start testing Qt 5.13 beta release(s) and report your findings via Jira,” he continued. “It is really important to do the testing now; we need to understand the release status and recognize release blockers as soon as possible to be able to get the final release out as planned.”

Turunen outlined plans for Qt last month, including support for WebAssembly and a technology preview of QtLottie – which allows the embedding of Adobe After Effects animations in QtQuick applications – both of which have been delivered in this beta.

The delay was down to a bug related to the version of Visual Studio used in the Qt CI infrastructure. That’s still not resolved, but the team decided to go ahead with the release anyway. Details of that, plus a brace of other Windows-related “known issues”, and a pile of Android-related issues are listed here.

There are a few platform changes to be aware of. Android 5.0 is now the minimum supported version.

Qt Canvas 3D has been deprecated , and is no longer part of 5.13, while Qt Script and Qt Quick Controls 1 are part of 5.12 but have been deprecated and slated for removal in subsequent releases.