Photomath at Droidcon NYC 2022

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Photomath Engineering

5 min readSep 27, 2022

After last year’s Droidcon in Berlin, this year Photomath Android team decided to go across the pond — Droidcon NYC became our new destination. For many of us this was the first visit to the Big Apple so the hype and the excitement were real.

Since we had already attended Droidcon events elsewhere, we had a sense of what to expect. We were not wrong, Droidcon NYC offered its standard repertoire:

Star speakers (khm Jake Wharton khm)
New and shiny things from the Android world
Deep dive into technologies that are becoming mainstream (yes, we’re not gonna be able to ignore Jetpack Compose for much longer)
Checking out the sponsor companies’ booths and mingling with people
Goodies, lots of goodies!

Trending topics

Within the two-day long conference, there were many talks to choose from. As a learning from last year’s Droidcon, the team prioritized talks with renowned speakers rather than just looking at their titles and descriptions.

Even at first glance of the agenda it was clear that two topics are currently dominating the Android world:

Jetpack Compose
Multiplatform solutions

Also, it’s worth mentioning that there were quite a few talks on the always present topic of Modularization as well as adapting UI for Android devices of various sizes (foldables, tablets…).

Jetpack Compose optimization

In my opinion one of the better and the more informative talks was given by Will Shelor titled Optimizing Render Performance of Jetpack Compose in which the speaker clearly pointed out what to do in order to speed up the rendering of Compose elements in our app.

This was (and still is) the key problem for not adopting Compose more widely throughout the Photomath app since we have many complex UI elements and our priority is to make them look and feel as smooth as possible which wasn’t always easy to achieve with Jetpack Compose.

It’s nice to get concrete tips on how to solve problems that are bugging you and Will did exactly that. :)

Scaling the team

A really interesting talk on scaling the Android team was held by Ty Smith, titled Mobile Developer Productivity at Scale — Android Platform Tech Lead at Uber. Ty explained the challenges Uber is dealing with regarding compilation times (10K+ modules), people onboarding and gave insight into tools they are using to handle the problems at scale. It was pretty impressive to see all the optimization processes they implemented in such an environment.

Kotlin Multiplatform

The other dominating topic clearly showed the direction the modern Mobile App development is going towards → Check out Russell Wolf’s talk Kotlin Multiplatform at five years.

In order to reduce costs and avoid redundant code on multiple platforms many companies are experimenting with multiplatform solutions and lately it seems that Kotlin Multiplatform is a way to go. So don’t worry my fellow Android developers, it’s not as scary and different as you might think, it’s actually the iOS side who will have to adapt and prepare for changes a bit more.

Expert level

The conference in general was definitely on a quite high level of expertise. Personally, I don’t think beginners in Android development would find these talks easy to comprehend. Even for our well seasoned team it took a lot of focus and using the most out of our listening skills to be able to understand all the ideas and technical details that were presented.

It was nice and reassuring, tho, to confirm that our Android team is already using (or at least trying to) the most of the best practices and concepts that were demonstrated by other experts from the industry such as:

putting a lot of emphasize on modularization
using modern architectural patterns
starting with Jetpack Compose integration
relying more and more on Coroutines and Flow
Introducing Baseline Profiles for app startup optimization (kudos to our newest team member Kristijan)

Mingling!

Of course, like every year one of the best parts of Droidcon is getting to know other engineers and people from the Android world.

We weren’t disappointed — the big guys arrived: Amazon, TikTok, Netflix, Microsoft, Tinder, Uber. Many of them had their own booths where they presented their products.

Even the traditional goodie hunt was successful, quite a few members of our team managed to acquire a year long stash of fresh T-shirts.

We were looking forward a lot to the after parties — this is where the most of the connections are made by meeting other companies’ professionals (engineers, managers, product guys…) as well as presenting our own app and product.

A few beers definitely helped speeding up that process. :)

What was very satisfying to see is how many people recognize the Photomath app and our brand in general, not only at Droidcon, but also in the streets of New York. We had several encounters where college and high school students (and even young engineers from the big companies) would thank us for the cool and helpful product we’re creating. It all makes sense once you see others appreciating all the hard work done by the team throughout all these years and that definitely motivated us to push even harder in the future.

The City That Never Sleeps

New York as a city definitely fulfilled all of our high expectations — the city that never sleeps, its parks, museums, restaurants, Broadway theaters, comedy shows, you name it! They’ve got it all. A wonderful place to bond with the team and get to know each other even better.

Oh, I forgot pizza — do not skip New York pizza even if it’s from the one dollar pizza stand!

To conclude, Droidcon NYC 2022 was a success story for our team. We got the latest news, we reassured ourselves we’re doing things the right way and we got to make lots of new connections with all the cool people from the industry in one of the best cities in the world.

Things to improve

There are, though, two things I missed this year:

Panel discussions -> it’s always interesting to hear different opinions and approaches on trending topics
Chet Haase’s talk -> Android legend and his comedy talk/show would already be a reason good enough to travel to the other continent