Running the world's largest mobile developer conference with Greg Fawson of next.app devCon
Published on September 25, 2026
For this episode of the Tech Lounge, I met Greg Fawson at Messe Berlin, the city’s main trade fair venue. Thankfully not on the show floor, as Greg works for the Messe itself. He’s the CEO of Mobile Seasons GmbH, the company behind droidcon, and we talked about next.app devCon, which takes place at the CityCube Berlin from 7 to 9 October 2026.
From droidcon to a whole mobile ecosystem
Greg is American, but first came to Germany in the late 1980s when his father worked on auxiliary power units for some of the first Airbus aircraft. He went to school in Frankfurt am Main for a few years, moved back to the US, and ran his own company for about 15 years. When he and his wife started having kids, they didn’t want them to grow up with a single perspective on the world, so they moved to Germany for a two-year master’s degree. That was 16 years ago.
Few people know the name Mobile Seasons, because the company always just operated as droidcon. The first droidcon took place in Berlin in 2009, organised through a community on XING, the German LinkedIn, with about 200 developers. Android was still new, and the first devices were only just appearing. Greg told me that at the first meeting, the founder asked whether the event should run in German or English, and two developers from the UK asked for English. They went home and started droidcon London the same year. Before COVID, more than 20 droidcon events ran around the world, mostly organised as franchises by local Google Developer Groups.
I had always assumed droidcon was a Google event. Greg credits Google for developing Android in an open way where the community played a big role in solving problems early on, but droidcon is independent. He sees value in that. Google’s own events give the top-down corporate message, and right now, a lot of that message is about AI. At droidcon, there’s still plenty of nuts-and-bolts content, such as how to build something with Jetpack Compose. Messe Berlin acquired Mobile Seasons in 2016 or 2017 as part of an internationalisation strategy, and the event has run on the Messe grounds since then.
Why bring the communities together
The move towards a broader event started with Flutter. During COVID, the UK loosened restrictions before Germany did, and Greg decided to run droidcon London. He invited the UK Flutter community, which hadn’t met in person for a couple of years, to run a single two-day track alongside it.
At the same time, the number of Flutter sessions at droidcon had grown from three to 18 over a few years. Greg realised that the format was serving no one. Android developers were past the “here’s this thing called Flutter” stage, and professional Flutter developers were past introductory talks about adding Flutter to a native app. So in 2023, Mobile Seasons launched Fluttercon in Berlin as a separate event under the same roof, with its own tracks and exhibition areas, but with the chance for the communities to mix.
next.app devCon extends that model to the whole mobile ecosystem. This year, it combines droidCon, flutterCon, swiftCon, reactCon, masCon for mobile application security, agentic codingCon, a Tech Lead Summit, and a CTO event, and the organisers expect around 6,000 developers. Greg doesn’t want it to become a general developer conference, but he thinks the silos between platforms are slowly coming down. Someone who calls themselves an Android developer today may call themselves a mobile platform developer or mobile architect in a few years.
We also talked about cross-platform tools. Greg pointed out that approaches such as Kotlin Multiplatform often break for cultural reasons rather than technical ones. They need strong top-down buy-in, because it’s hard to convince an iOS team from the bottom up to write all the shared business logic in Kotlin and become UI developers.
Running events in Berlin in 2026
Greg thinks Berlin is a great place for developer events because of its diversity, and because English is often the language of its offices. But the market has changed. People buy tickets much later than they used to, and companies now often expect education budgets to cover travel as well. I’ve noticed the same last-minute buying with the gaming event I help run, where ticket sales only pick up in the final weeks.
Community events have also struggled to come back after COVID. Some are thriving, others are at about half their old size. Greg sees a few reasons. Before COVID, Android developers were in high demand and had a strong motivation to be seen in the community. Companies also hired large numbers of junior developers, who used meetups to upskill and network, and with fewer junior hires, that culture has faded. He also described a kind of half-life for community involvement: developers are active for a few years, then life happens, such as a new pet, children, or a move into engineering management.
This is partly why next.app devCon now includes the Tech Lead Summit. Greg admitted that part of the reason was selfish. Many friends he used to see at events had moved past that stage of their careers, and he wanted them back. I recently went to a lead developer event in Berlin and recognised half the people there from meetups years ago, so I understand.
I asked how next.app devCon competes with general events such as WeAreDevelopers, which to me has always felt a bit like Web Summit for developers. Greg’s answer is focus. Mobile is in the event’s DNA, and he’d rather an engineering manager send their iOS team to three days of three concurrent Swift tracks than to an event with a handful of mobile talks.
23 stages and too much to see
I’ve felt that many events run too many tracks at once. next.app devCon has 23 stages running concurrently. Greg’s argument is that each stage is specialised. The organisers look at how much unique content a community has and how large its pool of experts is. Android doesn’t need ten talks on Jetpack Compose, but it might need two or three on animations, lists, or forms. masCon runs a single track for three days, agentic codingCon has two stages, and a crossover track covers topics that apply to all mobile developers. droidCon alone runs five tracks, including one on Android Automotive. It’s too much for one person, so Greg’s advice is to bring the whole team.
AI tools and native apps
When I asked what excites him in mobile development, Greg said you can’t avoid AI, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. He mentioned Ntive Labs, the team behind Touchlab, and its first product, Parive. It uses AI to compare a native Android app and a native iOS app feature by feature and shows where they have drifted apart. Often, a company only finds out when a customer complains in an app store review that their partner’s phone shows something different. In Greg’s house, the men use Android and his wife and daughter use iOS, so he knows how that happens. For banking or other regulated apps, that consistency can matter a lot.
This connects to something I’ve noticed. Business-focused cross-platform apps often end up mediocre on every platform, but AI tools have made it easier to build and maintain native apps that stay in sync. Notion, for example, is apparently releasing its first native Mac app instead of an Electron one.
The hardest part
Greg sits on all the program committees and evaluates several hundred submissions, but the hardest part right now is predicting how the market will behave. The organisers plan for several thousand developers, but with late ticket buying, nobody has a crystal ball. He joked that the grey in his beard tracks the planning stress. He used to spend the week after each event saying “never again”, only to start planning the next one two weeks later. Now he has a great team, and he knows the day after the event is a beautiful thing.
Wrapping up
If you’re in or near Berlin from 7 to 9 October and work in mobile development, next.app devCon is worth a look. I can’t attend this year, which is why we recorded this interview instead of talking on the show floor, but I hope to go next year, and maybe give a talk about building macOS-first apps with Swift.
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