Back in late 2018 there was the decision by The Qt Company to deprecate Qbs in favor of CMake . The Qbs build system hasn't been actively worked on by The Qt Company in one year but some community members have been still hacking on it leading to today's Qbs 1.17 release.

This build automation tool has nearly three hundred patches compared to the prior release. Qbs 1.17 adds a Cap'n Proto module for a C++ serialization protocol similar to Protobuf, many C/C++ support improvements, Apple Xcode 12.0 support on macOS including universal x86_64/ARM64 binaries, initial support for Qt 6, and Android support improvements.

More details on Qbs 1.17 via the Qt blog . Moving forward though with the upcoming Qt 6.0 release, the toolkit will be centered around CMake as its main build system.