Last week I attended DroidCon Berlin and on the way there I wanted to check out the schedule and install their app ahead of time.

Turns out they still had the one from 2022 on the App Store, 2023 did never exist in the first place1 and this years’ app is nowhere to be seen.

Last change log: Get ready for Droidcon Berlin 2022

Of course non-functional.

Tableflip emoji for not being able to reach long-gone backend server

The reviews are catastrophicly bad and they just can’t be bothered fixing it.

Excerpt from random user review: …If this is supposed to be some kind of example for kotlin multi platform it would nicer to take it serious or else it may give a wrong impression

Update: It turns out they unpublished the old one and added a new one under a different name and app identifier2 on the first day of the conference.

The Message

There’s literal tons of bad apps out there, but it just hits different to provide a shitty and uncared for app for a conference where the core message is app quality and craftsmanship.

Doubly so, if you consider this problem to be long solved by other conferences.

The first goal should always be to make an outstanding (and usable app3) app. If that happens to be with shiny, new, cool tech, more power to you.

Confetti

I had already gone back to using the mobile webpage and lots of scrolling, when Sebastian Aigner pointed me to John O’Reilly’s Confetti app.

App is small, fast and Open Source on GitHub. This way I can not only rant but also put my moneyeffort where my mouth is and actively contribute to solving the issue for DroidCon 2025: #1383, #1387

  1. Had to use the mobile website last year on iOS. Yes, it was that dire. ↩

  2. Equally bad app (check the Reviews) ↩

  3. Unfortunately, this has to be explicitly added now. ↩