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The Ultimate KMP Watchlist: Level Up Your Skills in 10 Talks
The best way to skip the “beginner mistakes” phase is to learn from the teams who have already solved them at scale.
For Week 3 of KMP Level Up, we’ve curated the Top 10 KotlinConf talks that cover the full spectrum of adoption, from massive production case studies to deep dives into the compiler. Whether you are looking for architectural inspiration, hard data to convince your stakeholders, or just want to understand the engineering magic under the hood, the answers are out there.
Here is your KMP marathon for the week.
🌍 Part 1: Production Case Studies
Theory is nice, but does it scale? These teams proved it does.
Duolingo + KMP: A Case Study in Productivity | John Rodriguez & Johnny Ye (2025)
Duolingo ships weekly to 40M+ daily users across Android, iOS, and Web. Shipping that fast requires efficiency. This talk breaks down their specific rubric for deciding what to share, from Video Calls to Math lessons, and how they handle the velocity required to ship constantly without breaking platform quality.
Leveraging KMP for Navigation in the McDonald’s App | Cas van Luijtelaar & Anthony Bassey (2025)
Most teams start by sharing the data layer, but McDonald’s went much further. They use KMP to drive the navigation state itself. In this talk, they show how they keep the UI 100% native (Compose & SwiftUI) but let the shared KMP layer decide where to go and what data to pass, effectively creating a scalable “dumb client” architecture.
Two Years with KMP: From Zero to 55% Shared Code | Rodrigo Sicarelli (2024)
StoneCo is a fintech giant serving 4 million users. This isn’t a “hello world” story; it’s about training 130 mobile engineers to shift their paradigm. They break down how they achieved 55% code sharing across two massive apps and the measurable impact on developer satisfaction and velocity.
Meetup with KMM Libraries | Colin Lee (2023)
If you are overwhelmed by the library ecosystem, watch this. Colin walks through the transition from a legacy codebase to a greenfield KMP app. He highlights the specific stack that saved them (Apollo GraphQL, SQLDelight, Moko Resources) and how they survived the initial “panic” from the iOS team to reach a point where everyone loves the shared workflow.
🛠️ Part 2: Getting Your Hands Dirty
Okay, you’re inspired. Now let’s look at the code.
Compose Multiplatform for iOS: Ready for Production | Sebastian Aigner (2025)
Compose Multiplatform is no longer experimental—it’s stable on iOS. Sebastian gives you the tour of the ecosystem, showing how to build production-grade UIs that share rendering logic while still feeling at home on Apple devices. Perfect for understanding the current state of the art.
Confetti: Building a Conference App in 40 Minutes | John O’Reilly & Martin Bonnin (2023)
This is a live-coding masterclass in “Full Stack Kotlin.” Watch John and Martin build a working app from scratch in real-time. They spin up a Spring Boot backend with GraphQL, generate type-safe Kotlin models on the client with Apollo, and wire it up to native UIs (Compose & SwiftUI). It’s the best demo of how tight the loop can be when you use Kotlin end-to-end.
🍎 Part 3: The iOS Perspective
Because your iOS teammates need to love this too.
KMP in Action: A Production Case Study | Annyce Davis (2024)
Convincing an iOS team is often the hardest part of adoption. Annyce details Meetup’s migration, specifically focusing on the “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me) factor for skeptical engineers. The killer insight: after migrating networking to KMP, their iOS app actually got faster because it inherited optimized caching logic that was previously missing.
Kotlin Multiplatform for iOS Developers | Salomon Brys (2023)
KMP is often pitched to Android devs, but what about the other side of the aisle? Salomon steps “behind enemy lines” to explain KMP from an iOS perspective. He covers the toolchain, the limitations, and how to create a workflow that doesn’t make iOS developers feel like second-class citizens.
ℹ️ The ecosystem has grown significantly since 2023. New features like experimental Swift Export now allow idiomatic Swift calls without Objective-C headers. However, Salomon’s core advice on team dynamics and workflow remains essential viewing.
🤿 Part 4: The Deep Dive
For those who want to see how the magic trick is performed.
Using C & native platforms in Kotlin: Building a multi-platform advanced library | Salomon Brys (2024)
Sometimes you need to go low-level. Using cryptography as an excuse, this talk demonstrates how to build an advanced library that links against native C dependencies, aligns JNI with Kotlin/Native C-interop, and connects to Swift SDKs. Essential viewing for library authors.
Implementing Compose Hot Reload | Sebastian Sellmair (2025)
Hot Reload is a productivity game-changer, but implementing it on the JVM required deep engineering work. Sebastian breaks down the journey, from fighting ClassLoaders to patching the Kotlin Compiler to handle “shifting lambda names.” A fascinating look under the hood of the tooling we take for granted.
📺 Want to watch them all in one go? We’ve compiled every talk from this list into a single KMP Level Up Playlist on YouTube. Save it to your library and start your marathon.
🎫 Join us in the Real World
These talks represent the current state of the art, but the ecosystem is moving fast. The best way to stay ahead is to be where the conversations happen.
KotlinConf 2026 tickets are on sale now! Come meet these speakers, ask the hard questions, and see the future of KMP before it hits YouTube.
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