Embarcadero is pleased to announce the availability of Delphi 13 Community Edition, the latest free edition of our professional Delphi development environment.
Delphi 13 Community Edition is based on Delphi 13 Florence and brings the Community Edition forward from version 12.1. This gives students, hobbyists, independent developers, and eligible startups access to the Delphi language and framework improvements delivered in versions 12.2, 12.3, and 13.0—including updated support for today’s mobile platforms.
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What Is Delphi Community Edition?
Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language. It includes a professional IDE, visual designers, integrated compilers and debuggers, the VCL framework for Windows development, and the FireMonkey framework for creating native applications from a shared codebase across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
It is designed for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and small teams that meet the Community Edition license requirements.
What’s New Since Delphi 12.1?
Moving from Delphi 12.1 Community Edition to Delphi 13 Community Edition delivers a substantial collection of language, IDE, framework, and platform improvements.
New Delphi Language Features
Delphi 13 introduces several useful additions to the Delphi language, available across the supported target platforms:
- A new conditional expression, or ternary operator, implemented with the if keyword
- The new NameOf intrinsic, which returns the name of an identifier as a string
- New is not and not in operators for clearer and more natural expressions
- New {$PUSHOPT} and {$POPOPT} compiler directives for saving and restoring compiler options
- A new noreturn directive for procedures that do not return control to their caller
- Improvements to generic type constraints
- An implicit Self parameter in the Initialize and Finalize operators of custom managed records
These additions make Delphi code more expressive while retaining the language’s readability and strong native-code foundations.
A More Capable Development Environment
Delphi 13 Community Edition includes the updated 32-bit IDE and the new 64-bit IDE for developing and debugging 64-bit Windows applications. The 64-bit IDE provides a much larger address space, which is particularly valuable when working with large projects.
The IDE also includes:
- A 64-bit Delphi language server for improved support for large projects
- Search and filtering in key IDE panes, including the Project Manager, Structure view, Messages, and Event Log
- Focus Mode for a distraction-free code editing experience
- Editor scrollbar annotations for changes, bookmarks, errors, and warnings
- Split editor views
- The option to use the reintroduced Classic Delphi CodeInsight engine
- GetIt package versioning, allowing developers to select a specific available version of a package
- Numerous improvements to Delphi code tooling, debugging, IDE responsiveness, stability, and quality
FireMonkey Improvements
FireMonkey remains the foundation for Delphi multi-device development. Since Delphi 12.1, it has gained a broad set of enhancements, including:
- A new Display Link service for smoother and more stable animations
- Faster bitmap copying through GPU acceleration
- A new TMaskEdit component
- A new TApplicationEvents component
- New alignment options for centering controls
- Additional scrolling, bounce, and touch interaction controls
- Extended spell-checking support
- Updated Skia4Delphi integration
- General performance, platform integration, and quality improvements
VCL Improvements for Windows
Delphi 13 also advances the VCL framework for native Windows development with:
- Styled custom title bars
- Improvements to TControlList, TFormTabsBar, and TToggleSwitch
- Scrolling support for TActionMainMenuBar
- Updated WebView2 integration in TEdgeBrowser
- Expanded and refreshed Windows and WinRT API support
Updated Mobile Platform Support
One of the most important benefits of Delphi 13 Community Edition is updated mobile development support.
For Android, Delphi 13 supports building native 32-bit and 64-bit ARM applications with an updated Android toolchain. It targets Android API level 35 and includes support for Android 15 features such as 16 KB memory page sizes. It also improves Android SDK and NDK integration, deployment tooling, Java library import, and the Java2OP bridge.
For Apple platforms, Delphi 13 supports native iOS applications for iOS 18, including development for both physical devices and the iOS Simulator on Apple Silicon Macs. The release also includes expanded iOS API headers and updated platform integration.
Delphi developers can therefore continue to use a shared FireMonkey codebase while targeting current Android and iOS devices with native applications.
Who Can Use Delphi Community Edition?
Delphi Community Edition is intended for:
- Students learning programming and native application development
- Hobbyists building applications for personal use
- Freelance developers and individual developers earning less than US$5,000 per year from their applications
- Startups and organizations with annual revenue below US$5,000 and teams of up to five developers
Delphi Community Edition is free of charge, comes with a one-year term license, and includes a limited commercial-use license. If you are unsure whether you qualify, review the Community Edition License FAQ. Community Edition is not intended as an extended trial and should not be used by an organization that already has regular commercial Delphi licenses.
Once your development or business needs move beyond the Community Edition limits, Delphi Professional, Enterprise, and Architect offer unrestricted commercial licenses and additional capabilities.
Download Delphi 13 Community Edition
Whether you are discovering Delphi for the first time, learning native application development, or updating from Delphi 12.1 Community Edition, Delphi 13 Community Edition gives you a modern, productive environment for building fast native applications for Windows and mobile platforms.
Download Delphi 13 Community Edition today and start building: Download Now
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