Our Droidcon US 2026 Picks

Droidcon USA is happening this week in Orlando and we are excited to have two Touchlab speakers on their way there now. While you wait for the talks to start (or the videos to come out), here are some of the talks we are most excited about tuning in to.

The Touchlab Talks

Native Mobile and AI

Kevin Galligan will be bringing an honest discussion of how AI is changing the equation of development across multiple platforms. Many of the problems with building independent Android and iOS applications (time, language differences, team makeup) aren’t the roadblocks they used to be. But AI development introduces new challenges of its own. How do you keep platforms aligned as the pace of change increases? How do you build a solid foundation for your agents? These are important questions for any mobile team in 2026

Advanced Kotlin Native Integration

Tadeas Kriz will be diving deep into the mechanics of Kotlin Native builds and it’s impacts on your project structure. As more and larger teams adopt KMP, new patterns need to be established to handle the variety and complexity of project structures. Large projects are often broken up into multiple repositories managed by multiple teams. Scaling KMP into these projects can be difficult due to Kotlin Native’s single framework limitation. Tadeas has helped navigate these issues at several of Touchlab’s enterprise clients and will be sharing his insights here.

Oxidize your Kotlin by adding some Rust

As a Touchlab alum, Russell Wolf gets a shout out here as well. His talk on integrating KMP and Rust is sure to be interesting for anyone looking to bring existing (or new) low level libraries into their multiplatform environment. Kotlin Native’s interop tools are powerful, but they take some getting used to.

Other Interesting Talks

To Migrate or Not? Managing Technical Hype Cycles with KMP & AI

Helping people navigate new technologies and understand when and how to approach migrations is Touchlab’s bread and butter. We’re excited to hear Lauren Darcey’s take on how to best introduce change in the AI era an hopefully will pick up some new ideas to bring to our clients.

Trailblaze: Map Your App for AI

AI’s ability to accelerate testing and verification is incredible, but it’s something that has been tricky for mobile. We look forward to Sam Edwards walk through Trailblaze to see how it tackles the unique challenges of testing on mobile.

The End of build.gradle: Embracing Declarative Gradle and Software Types

We all get introduced to the basics of Gradle when we start developing Kotlin, but truly mastering it is a different story, especially when it continues to evolve. Thomas Belk’s introduction to Declarative Gradle will be a good introduction to the latest experimental feature.

Go Beyond the Prompt: Using Context to Build Reliable AI-Assisted Android Workflows

Successful AI development workflows require intentional context engineering. Rafa Moreno rightly points out that AI tooling and training remains largely web focused. We look forward to hearing their approach to building a robust foundation for AI workflows.

Cross-platform Strategies for Porting and LLM-Driven Development

As we’ve discussed a few times above, AI changes how we can approach cross platform development. There are new choices to make around blending KMP and other porting strategies. Judy Lin and Amy Hu’s insights on how Duolingo approached these choices will be fascinating.

Coroutines vs. Threads: The True Cost of a Context Switch

Coroutines are part of every single dev working with Kotlin these days, bringing an elegant solution to concurrency. However, you may still encounter legacy codebases that rely heavily on Threads, and knowing exactly how they work under the hood can be a lifesaver. In this talk, Ariella goes beyond the Kotlin APIs to explore the actual OS and hardware-level anatomy of a context switch. Expect to see exactly why blocked threads are so expensive, backed by a live Android Studio Profiler demo.

Good luck to all the speakers!

There are many other talks we could have included. It’s shaping up to be a good conference. We hope everyone has a great time!