Droidcon London 2015 was a major Android developer conference in London that brought together engineers, designers and vendors for talks, workshops and hands‑on sessions.

Droidcon

London, England

Oct 2015 (2 days)

android, ui/ux, mobile development

Table of Contents

Conference Notes #

Basic information #

Droidcon London 2015 took place on 29–30 October 2015 in London, United Kingdom. It is widely described as the largest Android developer conference in Europe and is organized by Novoda and Skills Matter.

The conference is strongly focused on Android development, but it also covers the wider ecosystem around Android: tooling, design, testing, performance, and new device categories (wearables, VR, Android Auto, etc.). In 2015 it attracted over 1,000 developers and featured a large number of talks and workshops across two days.

Why I attended #

This was my first Android conference, and it immediately felt different from smaller local meetups. For the first time, I experienced an event that was not only community-driven but also clearly supported by major companies in the Android world (including Google and many well-known tech companies in the expo hall).

I was honestly surprised by the scale: multiple parallel tracks, a busy expo area, and a speaker line-up that included several “big names” I had followed online.

First impressions: scale, people, and London #

The event felt like a real gathering of the Android ecosystem. You could see developers from startups, agencies, and big companies all in one place, and the overall mood was very social. Between talks, people would compare notes, discuss libraries and architecture choices, and argue (in a friendly way) about build tools, UI patterns, and best practices.

London also added to the experience: it’s a great conference city, and after a full day of technical talks it was easy to continue conversations in pubs and restaurants nearby. Some of my best memories are actually from these informal discussions—meeting people whose work I knew from GitHub or Twitter and then talking to them like normal humans over a beer.

Speaker highlights #

What made Droidcon London 2015 stand out for me was how many well-known speakers were there in person. At the time, names like these were a big deal in the Android community:

Jake Wharton — talked about Kotlin and why the language could improve Android development (extension functions, safer code, better syntax, etc.). Kotlin felt “new” to many Android devs back then, and this talk helped make it feel practical rather than experimental.
Chet Haase (Google at the time) — delivered one of the most memorable sessions, mixing humor with real experience. This was the first time I saw him live, and he was basically doing a conference keynote as a stand-up routine (while still making useful points).
(Side note: he’s not at Google anymore today, but in 2015 he was a major voice in Android UI/graphics.)
Nick Butcher & Benjamin Weiss (Android DevRel) — covered motion/animation topics (“meaningful motion”), showing how Material Design was pushing Android UI forward with real APIs and patterns.
Cyril Mottier — deep technical UI content (especially around scrolling and touch/interaction complexity).
Eric LeFortune — talked about the then-new Jack & Jill toolchain direction (Google experimenting with moving parts of the pipeline away from the classic javac -> dx flow, and integrating things like shrinking/obfuscation more tightly).

For me as a developer, it was motivating to see that these weren’t just “internet personalities”—they were approachable speakers who cared about the craft.

Themes that felt “new” in 2015 #

A few topics felt especially current at Droidcon 2015, and looking back they capture what Android development was struggling with at the time:

Reactive programming / reactive streams #

In 2015, reactive approaches (RxJava in particular) were becoming a major trend. It felt like the community was actively shifting from callback-heavy code toward streams and composable asynchronous logic. Even if you didn’t fully adopt it immediately, it was clear that reactive patterns were shaping how teams thought about app architecture.

Gradle and build performance #

The Android build system was a constant pain point in that era. Talks about Gradle and build tooling were packed because every team wanted:

faster builds,
more reliable CI,
and more control over dependencies and variants.

Hearing about improvements to Gradle and the Android build pipeline was exciting because it promised productivity gains that would affect everyone, every day.

Build toolchain changes (Jack & Jill era) #

The conference captured a moment where Google was experimenting with a more controlled toolchain (Jack & Jill) instead of relying on the traditional Java compilation pipeline. Even though we now know that Jack didn’t become the long-term future, at the time it signaled a serious attempt to modernize Android development constraints.

Material Design, motion, and vector drawables #

Material Design wasn’t just about colors and typography anymore—animations and transitions were becoming first-class design tools. Talks on motion, meaningful transitions, and vector drawables showed how Android UI was maturing into something more expressive without needing extreme amounts of custom code.

Expo hall and “Android beyond phones” #

The expo area was not just a sideshow. It reinforced that Android was expanding quickly:

VR demos
wearables
Android Auto (including an Android Auto enabled car setup)
tooling companies (emulators, CI, dev productivity tools)

It also gave the conference a strong “industry” feeling: not only apps, but also platforms, hardware, and developer tooling.

One of the best parts was meeting people outside the talks. The after-hours discussions (especially in pubs) were where I learned the most practical lessons—what works on real teams, what fails, and what trade-offs people make under deadlines.

It was also a rare chance to talk casually with developers whose blog posts, libraries, or conference videos I had already learned from.

Conclusion #

Droidcon London 2015 left a strong impression on me because it combined:

high-quality technical content (tooling, UI, performance, architecture),
top-tier speakers who shaped the Android ecosystem at the time,
and a very social, open developer atmosphere.

As my first Android conference, it showed me how large and fast-moving the Android world really was—supported by major companies, driven by strong community figures, and full of people who genuinely enjoyed sharing what they had learned.

Schedule #

These were the talks I attended.

Day 1 #

9:00 Keynote - The Long Road @sandromancuso
10:30 RxJava
11:30 Gradle Perf (Gradle dev vp)
11:30 Reverse Engineering
12:30 Gradle Plugins
14:30 Gradle Android Perf tips
15:15 Adv. Concurrency
15:45 Animate me - if you dont do it for me, do it for chet

Day 2 #

9:00 Keynote - Android for Java Devs (Haase)
10:00 Jack & Jill (Eric lafortune)
11:00 ORMs
11:00 Android Wear
12:00 Scrolling techniques (cyril mottier)
13:45 Power optimization
13:45 Building Meaningful Motion (Nick Butcher)
14:45 Advanced Development with Kotlin (Jake Wharton)
15:45 Vector Graphics in Android
15:45 Infer - Static Analysis Tool by facebook