Last week I participated once again in Droidcon Berlin, the annual conference for Android developers. For three days I listened to presentations, talked to other developers and for the very first time, presented something myself as a speaker.
Presentations#
Going into my fourth Droidcon, I already knew what kind of talks are the most interesting for me. I prefer talks that either give me an insight into a topic, that I don’t know much about or topics that give me some immediate, actionable tools that I can use right away. Sadly, some didn’t turn out as I expected, so I didn’t really benefit from a bunch of topics that sounded interesting at first. There were however a few that I liked:
“Making the world spin, does it have to be so hard?” by David Göransson showed a great, real life example of how to mix OpenGL with Jetpack Compose to display a lightweight, 3D interactive globe to visualize Mullvad’s server locations in their app.
“Loading…Please Wait: A Guide to Loading Animations in Jetpack Compose” by Kinnera Priya Putti gave some quick, actionable tips on how to improve loading animations in apps. The topic itself could have been a bit more expansive, but since it was just a lightning talk, time was the limiting factor here.
“Let’s @Preview the Future: Automating Screenshot Testing in Compose Multiplatform” by Sergio Sastre Flórez showed one approach on how to use existing Compose previews to generate screenshots that can be used for automated screenshot testing.
Exhibitors#
One thing I like to do during Droidcon is to talk to all exhibitors to ask them about their products and services. If I already talked to them or know their service, I just ask them about their newest updates and features to catch up on the available tools and products in the mobile dev ecosystem.
This year I saw a lot of companies offering very similar observability services: Sentry, bitdrift, embrace, luciq (formerly instabug) and Kotzilla which somehow offers “AI Performance Monitoring for Koin”. I didn’t quite get why a dependency injection library is now being combined with a performance monitoring tool, yet.
The most notable tool from this bunch for me is bitdrift which allows for very detailed monitoring of user journeys in mobile apps while not being bound to logging limits that other products use in their pricing structure. It is discouraging thought, that their pricing page only shows a free- and a “call us for prices”-enterprise-tier.
Then there are the various services that want to improve your app’s security and a whole bunch of companies trying to help you either develop or test your apps with the help of AI. Juni by Intellij, Coderabbit, Firebender and others are all trying to make you type less code yourself. I just started using AI tools for small scoped tasks, which works decent enough, but beyond that I am not too impressed with the promises VS actual results.
This Droidcon, I was missing anything that has to do with XR, VR, AR, pretty much any R at all. With Googles XR headsets on the horizon, Meta didn’t show up with theirs and neither did Samsung or Google to promote their new plattform.
The Vibe#
In 2023, it felt like Kotlin Multiplatform, combined with Compose Multiplatform could become the new default framework to develop cross-plattform apps for mobile, desktop and web. It felt strange seeing the improvements while next door, Flutter was having their own conference. Fast forward to today, KMP is still not that widely used and I know no developer who has actually a Compose Multiplatform app in production. So Flutter seems to be safe for now and happily co-exists in their niche alongside native app development.
My first time as a speaker#
This years Droidcon Berlin also marks my debut as a speaker at a tech conference. I submitted a 20 minute lightning talk about accessibility and luckily got accepted. The weeks before Droidcon were pretty stressful for me as I scrambled to develop a good concept for condensing my experience about this topic and turning it into an engaging presentation. The final presentation consisted mostly of a live demo that showed the most important extra steps that developers should do, to improve their user interface specifically for screen readers. I was able to have a smooth presentation without technical difficulties and am very happy with the result.
Next conferences#
To my surprise, Droidcon Berlin 2026 is being replaced by next.app devcon. A multi-technology conference that consists of five separate conference brands that will be held all together at the same time and place. Droidcon and Fluttercon now will be combined with conferences for Swift, Reat Native, XR & Mobile Gaming. The more the merrier I guess. I hope that this combinations doesn’t mean that the Native Android portion is going to be smaller in total and already booked my super early bird ticket for 250€, which is a reasonable price for a tech conference.
Until then, I will check out Kotlinconf 2026 in Munich.
