droidCon USA 2026
as the organisers put it
droidCon USA is an Android App Development Event, bringing together Android professionals from around the world to share best practices, explore cutting-edge tools, and shape the future of mobile development. Featuring expert talks, hands-on sessions, roundtables, and networking, it’s the must-attend event for Android engineers, tech leads, and mobile dev teams.
who it's for
android engineers, mobile engineers, kotlin developers, engineering managers, mobile security engineers, devops and platform engineers, ux engineers
topics
declarative Gradle (build.gradle.dcl); AI-assisted migration tooling; Navigation 3 migration; Jetpack Compose Glimmer; Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) apps; edge LLMs on-device (Llama on Raspberry Pi); mobile profiling with Perfetto; agentic mobile agents and memory; AI-powered CI/CD for mobile; Android build performance optimizations; Kotlin IR compiler plugin for tracing; real-time multiplayer crossplay on Android
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Embracing Declarative Gradle and Software Types | Thomas Belk | 37m |
Declarative Gradle replaces imperative build.gradle.kts files with a restricted DCL language (example: build.gradle.dcl) that enforces isolated projects (no… | ||
| Congratulations, You're Staff. Now Why Are You Still Stuck? | Stacy L Devino | 51m |
Explains why the habits that made someone indispensable as Staff — owning work, being the “hero” and single point of failure — block promotion and gives… | ||
| How to Lead High-Stakes Initiatives Through Ambiguity | Bala Ramdoss, Sindhuja Venkatesh | 21m |
Executive vision arrives vague; the team maps current systems to requirements, keeps a live demo (used throughout development), and names the hardest… | ||
| Localization Lessons from Scaling Reddit to 35+ Languages | Michael Fullan | 39m |
Reddit scales Android localization to 35+ languages with a CI Python tool that uploads source strings to a TMS, nightly downloads translations, and enforces… | ||
| Teaching Agents to Pay: A Developer's Guide | Allison Farris | 34m |
Live demo builds an agent-driven checkout that uses Stripe to create Shared Payment Tokens passed to merchants so money never flows through the agent, and it… | ||
| Oxidize Your Kotlin by Adding Some Rust | Russell Wolf | 43m |
Shows a working KTRS demo that wires two Rust functions (add and echo) into a Kotlin Multiplatform module, using cargo and rustup to build native targets… | ||
| Your Agent Has Amnesia: Why Mobile AI Agents Need Memory to Be Useful | Yash Varyani | 23m |
Shows concrete experiments: raw model runs cost under $2 with ~4 model calls but repeatability suffers — 10 runs: 6 successes, 4 failures for Claude; adding… | ||
| From Chaos to Control: Future-Proofing Your Android Release Process | Keegan Rush | 22m |
Data-backed breakdown of what actually breaks mobile delivery: 49% cite manual steps as the biggest pain, teams spend 5 hours per release on busywork and 86%… | ||
| The Last Inch Problem in Mobile Observability | Kareem Kamel | 18m |
Argues that traditional server-side monitoring misses the “last inch” between API and finger, showing concrete failures: a sign-up flow broken for three weeks… | ||
| Pixel with Superpowers: Modern Android UI with AGSL Shaders | Kyriakos Georgiopoulos | 43m |
AGSL lets Android UIs run tiny GPU programs directly in Compose, compiling once with RuntimeShader + ShaderBrush or as a renderEffect via renderEffect/contents… | ||
| 14 State Machines That Must Agree for Bluetooth to Work | Nikheel Vishwas Savant | 39m |
Android Bluetooth requires 14 state machines to reach consistent states for simple connect/pair flows, not just one. The stack uses the state-machine base… | ||
| AI-Powered Creative Experiences | Mozart Louis | 22m |
Demos show on-device image and video enhancement running from Google Play GDM doing tone mapping, denoising, deblurring and super‑resolution with an easy… | ||
| Compose Multiplatform: Better Shared UI for iOS and Beyond | Márton Braun, Sebastian Aigner | 40m |
Compose Multiplatform claims production readiness across Android, iOS, Desktop and Web and shows concrete wins: 20% faster layouts and >10% canvas gains on iOS… | ||
| Your AI Wrote the Code. Now What? | Jonas Menesklou | 20m |
AskUI runs a single CSV test suite concurrently across an Android Automotive head unit via ADB, an Android tablet HMI, and a paired iOS companion app without… | ||
| Building Exceptional Android Location Experiences with Mapbox | Antonio Zugaldia | 41m |
Mapbox shows how a full Android location app — custom map styles, interactive search, isochrones, animated polylines, markers and a turn-by-turn navigation… | ||
| AI + Dev Environments + CI/CD for Mobile Teams | Naveen Nazimudeen | 47m |
Builds a KMP app that lists Bit R CI artifacts using Remote Dev Environments (RDE), an MCP connector and a Slack coding bot called Collga; AI agents generate… | ||
| Building Camera and Media Apps That Run Anywhere | Donovan McMurray | 39m |
Walks through concrete APIs and numbers: use CameraX Viewfinder to handle scaling/rotation across foldables, Player Composables with ExoPlayer for scrubbing… | ||
| Powering Compose Multiplatform Apps with Koog & MCP | John O'Reilly | 46m |
Live coding builds a Compose Multiplatform app that runs a Koog agent wired to real data: a Ktor client + local Kotlin tools call ClimateTrace, then a Kotlin… | ||
| Map Your App for AI | Sam Edwards | 45m |
Block’s open-source CLI Trailblaze turns LLM-driven app exploration into replayable YAML trails that run deterministically in CI and locally without hitting… | ||
| AppFunctions: Making Your Android App Agent-Ready | Chrystian Vieyra Cortes | 24m |
AppFunctions is a Jetpack framework that exposes typed, callable app capabilities to on-device agents by annotating functions, letting a Kotlin symbol… | ||
| Get More Mileage From Your Adaptive App With Android for Cars | Jan Kleinert | 41m |
Shows how to extend an adaptive app to run on both Android Auto and Android Automotive OS, citing 250 million Android Auto cars and over 100 models across 16… | ||
| Recent Mobile App Security Incidents from Real-World Cases | Jan Seredynski | 24m |
Camera and biometric checks are routinely bypassed by a repackaged APK sold on Telegram that spoofs the camera feed for $11, while the same group offers GPS… | ||
| Beyond the Copilot: A Blueprint for Autonomous Mobile Reliability | Ali Eldessouki | 31m |
Claim: an Luciq agentic observability stack plus Claude managed agents triages incoming bug reports, groups duplicates, and generates PRs that appear in GitHub… | ||
| Clean Code Revisited in the Age of AI | Danny Preussler | 33m |
Revisits Uncle Bob rules against the backdrop of LLMs and shows which rules still hold and which need tweaks: named arguments in Kotlin invalidate the “max 3… | ||
| Supercharged WebView Observability | Jackson Hardaker, Miguel Juarez Lopez | 23m |
Hybrid solution injects a controlled JavaScript SDK into each WebView and ships metrics back over the Android JS bridge, capturing Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP… | ||
| Scaling Distributed Tracing on Android With a Kotlin IR Compiler Plugin | Ishan Khanna | 40m |
Builds a Kotlin IR compiler plugin that rewrites function bodies at compile time to wrap methods in structured trace spans and automatically handle lifecycle… | ||
| Deep Dive into Compose Semantics | Thera Barnett | 34m |
Live demos show how TalkBack composes announcements and concrete fixes: use contentDescription, role, mergeDescendants to label clickables and group text, use… | ||
| Exploiting Android Icons for Fun and... Probably Not Profit | Mark Vadeika | 21m |
Shows how Android activity aliases and dynamic shortcuts plus a foreground service are used to make playable home‑screen games: a Tic‑Tac‑Toe (9 icons) and a… | ||
| How Play Integrity Stops Devices That Don't Exist | Kartik Agrawal | 39m |
Cash App reports Play Integrity prevents roughly $150,000/week in fraud, blocks ~2% of daily sign-ups and drives 13% of login blocks by combining… | ||
| Build Custom Design Systems with Jetpack Compose's New Styles API | Meghan Mehta | 23m |
Styles API in Jetpack Compose (experimental in Compose Foundation 1.12) replaces many per-component visual parameters with a single style parameter that… | ||
| Monetize Your Android App the Right Way | Austin Blake | 33m |
Android sees less than 1% conversion on initial payment versus ~2.6% on iOS, but trial conversion and lifetime spend are parity ($21.62 Google, $23.38 iOS)… | ||
| Elevating OS Experiences with AI-Driven Velocity | Dan Galpin, Aaron Labiaga | 36m |
Overview of concrete tools and demos: shows AppFunctions-based API plus a Jetpack library that auto-registers callable methods, Android CLI and skills that… | ||
| What billions of device ids reveal about Android app abuse | Keshia Rose | 20m |
Analysis of 2.2 billion identification events shows concrete abuse signals: 0.37% emulators, 0.12% rooted devices, 0.16% on-device app cloning, near-zero… | ||
| To Migrate or Not? Managing Technical Hype Cycles with KMP & AI | Lauren Darcey | 38m |
Practical rubric for whether to migrate: measure concrete gains (stability, performance, security) against actual maintenance cost, not hype; use Kotlin KMP… | ||
| Keynote - You are Load Bearing | Jason Pearson | 37m |
Claim: modern digital infrastructure literally rests on human attention as code, reviews, docs and onboarding strain under LLM-driven output. Examples: a… | ||
| The Swarm Next Door: Running Parallel AI Agents on a Real Android Codeba… | Josh Coffman | 44m |
Claims a practical workflow for running parallel AI coding agents on a real multi‑module Android repo using git worktrees and tmux panes to isolate agents… | ||
| HUMAN.md: Are we losing our skills in the SKILL.md era? | Eliza Camber | 38m |
Claim: industry adoption of SKILL.md trains agents to navigate code but produces human skill atrophy — juniors prompt stack traces instead of learning to… | ||
| Order Up: High-Stakes Leadership Lessons from 20 Years Behind the Bar | Kali | 50m |
Twenty years behind the bar inform a tactical playbook for leading Flutter teams: apply mise en place to prefill toolchains and backups, triage outages by… | ||
| Cross-platform Strategies for Porting and LLM-Driven Development | Judy Lin | 38m |
Duolingo describes mixing Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), Rive, Compose Multiplatform and web views: KMP holds stable chess logic (move validation, check… | ||
| The Android Lens: Applying Mobile Forensics to AI Performance | Amanda Hinchman-Dominguez | 35m |
Loads Llama 3.2 (1B) onto a Raspberry Pi 4 and profiles Ollama from Go/C++ down into ggml and quants.c, using Perfetto, btop, LeakCanary-style checks and a… | ||
| Navigation 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Hotfixed — A Production Story | Tetiana Synytsyna | 17m |
Migration takes two weeks, one developer, 302 files changed, and single-digit hours of sleep to move 170+ screens from Nav2 to Nav3 with no incremental path… | ||
| Agent skills for Android app development | Sagar Das | 41m |
Shows how to author Agent Skills for the Gemini CLI and Android Studio that embed exact procedures (example: a 10‑step XML→Jetpack Compose migration) and a… | ||
| Debugging Android Performance at Scale: Lessons from Building Datadog's Mobile Profiler | Arti Arutiunov | 40m |
Datadog builds a production profiling pipeline that uses ProfilingManager API (API 35+ with triggers in 36 and extra triggers in 37) to collect Perfetto… | ||
| From Zero to Particles: Animated particles Workshop | Piotr Prus | 11m |
A Compose Multiplatform particle emitter library implements two engines: a composable-based renderer for layouted particles and a high-performance canvas-based… | ||
| Real-Time Multiplayer on Android: Lessons from NYT Crossplay | Shafik Quoraishee | 45m |
A 15×15 interactive board ships as a hybrid AndroidView-in-Compose surface after five rewrites, using Android native drag-and-drop with ClipData because… | ||
| Your Agent Needs a Bedtime: Biology-Inspired Maintenance for Autonomous Agents | Andrew Orobator | 36m |
Persistent agents rot without scheduled offline consolidation: three concrete failure modes appear—contradictory skills, stale references, and repeated… | ||
| Spec Your Vibe with TDD | Nick Dipatri | 30m |
Adds a user‑feedback flow to the default Flutter counter app that sends messages to Slack, switches from a webhook to the Slack API, and refactors UI state… | ||
| Integrating Google Photos Picker API with Android Native Apps | Santosh Astagi | 18m |
Compares three concrete ways to pull media from Google Photos into Android apps: the native Android Photo Picker (no permissions, HDR-to-SDR copy, video max ~1… | ||
| I Taught an Agent to Build TV Apps: Lessons from Building a Coding Harness | Giovanni Laquidara | 45m |
An AI-driven harness is built that actually generates runnable TV apps (React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform, Android TV, Fire TV Vega) by chaining phased… | ||
| Claude Code at Scale: An Android Deep Dive | Mohit Sarveiya | 47m |
Shows how Claude Code stays aligned with an Android monorepo by using repo-level skills and rules and a company plugin marketplace to enforce standards across… | ||
| BFF4EAE: Your Backend's New Best Friend Forever | Stacy L Devino | 40m |
Argues that BFFs should stop shuffling JSON and become action-shaped APIs that ship intent not data, moving orchestration, retries, circuit breakers and… | ||
| Coroutines vs. Threads: The True Cost of a Context Switch | Ariella Mendel | 39m |
Explains that kernel-level context switches involve syscalls, a kernel trap, the scheduler saving registers and triggering CPU cache invalidation, while… | ||
| Protecting Your Users in an Agentic World | Chris Shmerling | 19m |
Android is adding an intelligence system that exposes two concrete integration paths: computer control runs an app in a virtual display the agent can operate… | ||
| What ExoPlayer Doesn't Tell You: Lessons from Reddit's Full Video Rewr… | Alexey Bykov | 42m |
Rewrote Reddit’s player on top of ExoPlayer into an opinionated ExoKit that uses a player pool, declarative playback store and a priority coordinator, and… | ||
| Advanced Kotlin Native Integration | Tadeas Kriz | 33m |
Kotlin Multiplatform on iOS cannot safely include multiple native binaries because each framework duplicates the Kotlin stdlib and runtime, causes incompatible… | ||
| Go Beyond the Prompt: Using Context to Build Reliable AI-Assisted Android Workflows | Rafa Moreno | 44m |
Argues that context beats clever prompts and shows how to make Android AI tooling reliable by scoping and externalizing knowledge, using agent memory files… | ||
| New Performance Challenges in the Agentic Era for Android Builds | Inaki Villar | 44m |
Measured data shows 3,300 local Gradle builds in one week with 1,700 agentic builds (52%), and a VS Code Kotlin extension that spawns a Gradle call per module… | ||
| Debugging Using Remote Compose, Made Easy with Livewire | Eric Kuck | 43m |
Livewire is an open source remote-Compose sidecar that serializes a custom Compose tree, diffs it (first frame a few KB, subsequent patches tens of bytes), and… | ||
| From Zero to Multiplatform: Building a Charts Library in 15 Days | Dinorah Tovar | 40m |
Claims a working, production chart library built with Compose Multiplatform and compiled to WebAssembly using Skia via Skiko, delivered across Android, iOS and… | ||
| Empowering the frontline: Develop high-performance AI applications seamlessly for Zebra devices | Nabiraj Seethalaprasad | 48m |
Zebra’s on-device AI Data Capture SDK provides pretrained, tokenless models and Android APIs that run on Zebra mobile computers using CameraX and an async… | ||
| Mastering Jetpack Compose Glimmer for AI Glasses | Siamak Ashrafi | 50m |
Shows how to bring full Android apps to Samsung AI Glasses using Jetpack Compose Glimmer and the Projected library, running on canary Android Studio and… | ||
| Small AI is the next Big Thing | Laurence Moroney | 46m |
Argues that tiny models (Gemma 4, Gemma 3, Tiny Llama, Quen) are now practical: fine-tune with LoRA on ~1,000 examples in ~2 hours on Colab, quantize to 4‑bit… | ||
| Native Mobile and AI | Kevin Galligan | 39m |
LLMs now translate production mobile code between platforms, claiming a 100k-line iOS app ported with off‑the‑shelf models in ~6 weeks and a similar app ported… | ||
| How We Built the Android Design System for The New York Times | Sameer More | 21m |
Builds a single Android library that centralizes JSON-defined design tokens and auto-generates Kotlin themes and component builders via Style Dictionary and a… | ||
| Extending Jetpack Architecture into 3D General Computing | Matt Belland | 32m |
Pico OS6 ships a Pico Spatial SDK that extends Jetpack Compose and Jetpack Architecture into shared 3D windows, supports multi-instance windows, and ties… | ||
| Shrinking Vector Graphics | Justin Brooks | 26m |
vgo is an open source tool that parses SVGs, Vector Drawables, and Jetpack Compose ImageVectors into a shared IR, runs format-agnostic optimizations (replace… | ||
| The Lord of Collection Functions: The Fellowship of Kotlin | Ben Kadel | 38m |
Walks through concrete Kotlin examples that replace imperative loops with actual collection functions, demonstrating replace forEach by using count (returns 1… | ||
| nothing matches | ||