This year DroidconDE conference proved to be very professional edition, among plusses

• Speakers
• Place/Location/Infrastructure/Wifi
• Food
• After hours event

among minuses

• Probably could give more time for each speaker, I had the feeling that some speakers required way more time to cover the subject and could deliver more insightful speeches.

We could see how mature Android become. Most of the talks were focused on emphasizing architecture of application bringing it to the new level, a lot of companies with billion auditories already have time to refactor their apps completely and extract good practices from those experiences. Along Architecture second most discussed topic was testing which also showing the maturity of the platform.

It was impossible to attend all sessions, but the other hot topics which worse to mention was IOT, RxJava, UI, Designing for the next Billion. Below you can see brief highlights of those topics.

Testing

• We have now right tools and architecture understanding of Android platform we finally can write all types of tests. And execute them fast
• Espresso and other UI tests could be flaky, and unreliable
• Test means also spending less time debugging
• Test your models and isolate them, test functions, not saving into cache or DB
• Just do it first and then see results and time spent. Writing tests can completely compensate time spent on manual testing and feedback, and explaining to other people how it should work.

IOT

• It is rapidly developing and growing, a lot of interesting talks and moves.
• Although it still quite hard to implement.
• BluetothLE works not so good as we wanted it to be.
• Many other different ways to connect to your devices USB, Bluetooth, WiFiSensors.

Architecture

• Android development now fully aware of pros and cons of different architectures.
• Clean Architecture(Layered) seen by me almost everywhere.
• MVP is UI architecture.

RxJava

• Reactive programming is becoming almost must, up to 60% of people I met and hands I saw using RxJava.
• Giants like Airbnb, Soundcloud rely on RxJava that means it is a very healthy approach. We can eliminate a lot of Android ceremonies with reactive programming.
• Test reactive code should be even easier.

Designing for the next Billion

• The phones are still very resource constrained.
• Other countries have way worse situation regarding traffic and battery charge.
• Profile memory and UI.

Slides/Videos/Audio

You can find video and slides from talks here. The video was recorded only on main stage but audio was everywhere.

Conclusion

Droidcon in Berlin is the best conference which I saw so far regarding organization and speakers. This conference is also the first one for all other droidcons all around the world. Definitely worse to visit this conference if you leave in Eastern Europe and love Android.