How to Submit a Conference Talk
Your next conference talk is hiding in your daily work
That bug you spent three days tracking down. The migration that looked straightforward until it wasn’t. The small change that finally made your app easier to use.
You might see these as ordinary parts of your job. Another developer could see them as exactly the experience they need to learn from.
If you have ever considered speaking at an app development conference but thought, “I don’t have anything worth presenting,” take another look at your daily work. Your next conference talk might already be there.
Start with a problem you remember
Choosing a topic can feel harder than writing the talk itself. You look at previous conference programmes, see unfamiliar technologies and experienced speakers, and wonder what you could possibly add.
Start closer to home. Think about a problem that made you stop, investigate and reconsider your approach.
Perhaps you improved a slow screen in an Android app, introduced accessibility testing into an iOS project, or helped your team make sense of an unfamiliar codebase. What did you try first? Why wasn’t it enough? What eventually helped?
Those questions give you the beginnings of a story, with a practical reason for someone else to listen.
What feels obvious now wasn’t always obvious
Once you have solved a problem, it is easy to forget how much you had to learn along the way.
The debugging technique you now use every week once took time to understand. Your team’s release checklist may contain lessons from a difficult deployment. A decision that now seems straightforward may have involved several competing options.
Think back to what you wish someone had explained before you started. That is a useful starting point for conference talk ideas.
You don’t need to claim your approach works for every team. Explain the context, the constraints and the trade-offs so other developers can judge what applies to their own projects.
The imperfect project has a story too
You can share valuable lessons from work that didn’t go to plan. Perhaps a library solved one problem and introduced another. A migration took longer than expected. A technically sound solution proved difficult for the team to maintain.
Walk the audience through your reasoning. What information did you have at the time? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? What would you investigate earlier next time?
Be specific, and check what you can share publicly. A useful technical story can explain a problem clearly while keeping client information and confidential details private.
Make the topic smaller
You don’t have to cover everything you know about mobile app development in one session.
A focused question gives you room to explain the details that make a talk useful. For example:
- Instead of “Accessibility in mobile apps,” explore what broke when you tested your app with larger text.
- Instead of “App performance,” explain how you investigated one slow interaction.
- Instead of “Working with legacy code,” share how you made a risky part of the codebase safer to change.
These are examples of possible angles. Your own experience will supply the details, decisions and surprises that make the session yours.
How to submit a conference talk: explain the takeaway
Once you have an idea, try completing this sentence:
“After this session, developers will be able to…”
Your answer helps you identify the audience and the practical value of your talk. It also gives your abstract a clear direction.
Explain the problem, the approach you will explore and what attendees can expect to learn. Be honest about the level of knowledge they need beforehand. A colleague can help you check whether the proposal makes sense to someone who wasn’t involved in the project.
Bring your experience to Appdevcon 2027
At Appdevcon, we want to hear the experiences behind building apps: the technical decisions, unexpected challenges and lessons worth sharing with other developers. Our Call for Papers welcomes proposals across iOS, Android, cross-platform development, mobile architecture and the human side of working in development teams.
Whether you have spoken before or are considering your first submission, start with one question: what have you learned that could help someone else?
The Appdevcon 2027 Call for Papers closes on 18 December 2026. All talks are presented in English.
