Generative AI is poised to be one of the most profound transformations in technology with a tremendous impact on society. In this talk we will provide a background on generative AI and discuss the intersection between generative AI technologies and mobile application development.

Join us as we explore the captivating journey involved in crafting a dynamic mobile messaging platform. Delving into the realm of platform design models, we will discuss their strengths and limitations. Gain insight into how Meta’s mobile Messaging System, Msys, was shaped by these considerations and how Msys scales to new clients as well as to other apps.

To develop effectively, mobile product engineers must be able to quickly see the results of their code changes. By late 2020, after years of codebase and complexity growth in Instagram's iOS app, our build times had slowly regressed to the point where engineers needed to wait multiple minutes for each build. Over the past two years, we've restructured our codebase and optimized our build times, allowing our builds to complete in a sixth of the time.

Learn about the history of Kotlin adoption at Instagram: from shipping Buck support in 2019 to introducing the new Kotlin compiler from Jetbrains in 2023. Instagram has shifted an incredibly large codebase from Java to mostly Kotlin (Instagram surpassed 50% lines of code in Kotlin in early 2023). This presentation will cover some of the technical challenges and cultural challenges of moving a complex codebase from one language to another. We will cover Kosabi, a Meta-built source-only-ABI generation tool to improve Kotlin incremental build speeds. We will also touch on how Kotlin enables the future of UI development by enabling Jetpack Compose.

Meta's Threads app launch shattered records, exceeding even CEO Mark Zuckerberg's expectations. With an unprecedented influx of users—achieving one million within an hour and surpassing 100 million in less than 5 days—the scale of this achievement raises questions. How does one orchestrate such a colossal launch? What does the timeline look like? What hurdles emerge, and how are they navigated? Join us for an insightful discussion that unveils the inception and remarkable journey behind launching the Threads app. Discover the strategies, challenges, and pivotal moments that contributed to this groundbreaking success. From conception to rapid adoption, gain valuable insights into the mechanics of launching an app of unprecedented proportions.

How we built Threads for Android in 5 months and reached 50 million people, while adopting Jetpack Compose for the first time for an entire app, and some learnings along the way.

The advent of React Native has been such a breakthrough in the mobile development space, allowing companies to build cross-platform applications with reduced costs and by bridging the gap between web and mobile. Developers are still amazed nowadays when they see how their web code can be ported to mobile devices without having to learn a whole new stack from scratch. But going from a single developer to adopting React Native at scale comes with its own fair share of challenges.

As the number of developers in your organization grows, you’ll have to face technical challenges and decisions such as the adoption of monorepos and the integration with brownfield applications. Building React Native at scale goes beyond just technical challenges but becomes a process and people problem, where the lines between mobile and web engineer blurs and developers are asked to ship code that lands on many platforms.

In this panel, experts from Meta, Microsoft, Shopify, and Coinbase, will share their insights into the highlights and the complexities of shipping React Native projects at scale. Join us in this session as you’ll have the opportunity to hear first-hand experiences of developers that are contributing to the framework, shipping new features and versions of React Native, and building billion-users applications on top of it.

Experimentation is key to shipping products today. On mobile devices, connectivity, latency, and coordination can make it challenging to keep a smooth and consistent user experience. In this talk you'll learn how Instacart built a mobile A/B system that scales to millions of devices, the challenges faced, and how a sprinkling of computer science fundamentals helped solve them.

Curious to learn more about Meta's work on UI Design Systems? Tune in to learn about the tooling and infrastructure we are building at Meta and go deeper into how we are utilizing common building blocks which are shared across multiple design systems and apps in order to scale!