The KotlinConf 2026 talks that we're excited about

The KotlinConf 2026 schedule was recently announced and there are a lot of talks to be excited about. With 80 talks to go through spanning various topics around Kotlin it can be hard to decide what to see and what to skip. To help out, we’ve compiled a list of talks that we are especially excited about here at Touchlab.

Advanced Kotlin Native Integration

First off there is Advanced Kotlin Native Integration by our very own Tadeas Kriz. This talk goes over some advanced topics around the impact of having multiple Kotlin Multiplatform binaries, and how to cut down compilation times while handling large complex project. Project organization and compile times are always important, especially in larger projects, so this talk will definitely be a good one to see.

Adventures in Whimsical UX

Ok this one’s really a personal choice. While there are a lot of talks about Compose Multiplatform (about 21), there’s one that really caught my eye: Adventures in Whimsical UX: The Tug-of-War Between Delight & Performance. This talk covers handling the balance between “making it delightful” and “making it performant” when it comes to UI. This challenge comes up often when making UI (as many of you may know, having to argue with designers), so I expect this talk to be helpful to a lot of UI developers with in Compose Multiplatform.

It not only covers basics but also animations, transition and even particle effects. Sure, not every app needs this much eye candy but the core concept still stands: how do you make a nice looking app that still works well on any kind of device. I’m hoping to learn about the animation frameworks and decisions they needed to make in order to make a performant, delightful app.

Honorable mention to Breaking Frozen Frames: Phased Rendering for Feature Rich UIs, which also covers performance in CMP

Expedited Shipping: Accelerating iOS Development with KMP at Amazon

iOS development has always been a key feature to Kotlin Multiplatform, with its fair share of hurdles. A lot of the talks at KotlinConf were about how to best handle the differences between Kotlin and Swift, and how to make developing iOS apps in KMP simpler. While there were various talks about the bridge between Kotlin and Swift, one talk covers a library designed to shake up the whole process.

Expedited Shipping: Accelerating iOS Development with KMP at Amazon covers a library created by Amazon, App Platform. While this library is still in it’s early stages, currently in version 0.0.8, it’s still an interesting library aiming to cover a lot of ground. Amazon designed this library to cover state management, dependency injection, and decoupling logic layers.

This talk also covers a deep dive into iOS integration, including all the challenges and learnings the team made and what architectural decisions they ended up making. It will definitely be an interesting discussion, and with the large scale of Amazon it will be interesting to see how well their development ended up.

There were three iOS lightning talks that I also wanted to recommend, so to stay in theme here are some lightning quick recommendations:

• SwiftPM support for Kotlin Multiplatform - Swift Package Manager support in Kotlin Multiplatform! You can already add CocoaPods to your ios sourceset, and now we’re getting SPM support.
• Swift Export: Where We Stand - Swift Export is a HUGE deal, adding Kotlin mapping to Swift. At this point though it sounds like it’s very experimental and there are some challenges using it.
• Can The Kotlin Swift Interop Ever Be Perfect - This talk dovetails nicely from Swift Export, covering the differences in Kotlin and Swift, and the challenges of designing Swift Export.

Kotlin/JS: Past, Present and Future

For a long time Kotlin Multiplatform meant mostly Android and iOS, but now it’s large support for Js and with WASM in beta there’s a lot to learn about Web development.

The talk Kotlin/JS: Past, Present and Future by JetBrains goes over the history of KotlinJs while also talking about what is next. This should be interesting as it feels like Web support for Kotlin is really ramping up lately, especially with Kotlin WASM in beta. There are some other talks around the Web platform, but this one seems especially interesting as it should cover what to expect in the near future for Web.

If you’re more interested in how you can use Web now, consider checking these talks out:

• Kotlin/Wasm: Finally, the missing piece for a full stack Kotlin webapp - This talk goes over the new Wasm beta support and how you can go from start to finish using Wasm.
• How your Web colleagues can start using Kotlin within their preferred environment - It’s hard to convince other non-Kotlin developers to use KMP, so this lightning talk can help you try and push Kotlin for those stubborn Web developers.

Spec-Driven Development with AI Agents: From High-Level Requirements to Working

AI is getting more and more popular as we can see from the 16 talks this year. These talks cover both using AI for your development, as well as using AI agents in your apps. It was hard to pick one talk, but when making a decision the one that stood out the most for me is Spec-Driven Development with AI Agents: From High-Level Requirements to Working. This talk covers using AI to your advantage when developing apps in a very structured way. Rather than simply giving a bunch of prompts this talk discusses how you can guide your AI through the planning process while writing documents along the way. We’ve seen a little bit of this with the BMAD Method, but this should be helpful in creating a strong plan of attack for your development.

Honorable Mentions:

• Full-Stack Kotlin AI: Powering Compose Multiplatform apps with Koog & MCP - Along a similar line of structuring AI, this talk covers MCPs and the new Koog Agent
• Increasing quality of AI generated Kotlin code - It’s easy to just ask AI a question and copy the response, but if you really want to make sure your responses are quality this is a good talk for you

Kotlin Performance Tracing on Android

A lot of the talks this year are about new emerging technologies and libraries, but it’s still important to cover important core topics around our existing code. Kotlin Performance Tracing on Android covers exactly that, by going in depth on the performance of apps using the Perfetto tool. Performance is something that affects all apps in one way or another, so this talk is something all Android developers should consider seeing.

Those are our top picks for talks at KotlinConf 2026, each one covering a different asset of Kotlin development. It was hard narrowing down the list, but there’s only so much time in the day to hear these talks. If you’re stressed you can’t make them all don’t worry. All of the talks will be available on YouTube after the conference, you just might have to wait a short while. Either way it sounds like it’s going to be a good year for Kotlin.