How do we select talks for iOSDevUK?
If you are an experienced conference speaker, you don’t need this. It is to help new speakers to think what they might talk about, and to present their expertise in the most positive light.
We have two parallel tracks for some of iOSDevUK, usually a more techie one and a less techie one. So talks don't need to appeal to everyone. The basic test we apply is: would a third of the people at iOSDevUK be interested in this?
We'll try to break down the kinds of talks we accept into different areas, and I will use examples from iOSDevUK 2024 to illustrate what we are talking about. The iOSDevUK 2024 app is still on the App Store. If you download it, you can see what the different speakers submitted as a summary of their proposed talk.
Hot topics
There are topics that seem like their time has come. Because of the timing of iOSDevUK, this splits into two parts. Firstly, there are topics that were announced at last year’s WWDC or have grown in importance. Obvious examples from WWDC 2025 might be Liquid Glass, Foundation Models, or Swift Concurrency. We will select some talks in those kinds of areas that we believe would be of interest to attendees. Such topics will have been around for a year by next September, so a selected talk is likely to discuss strategies for using the feature not just basic examples of doing so. Secondly, there are hot topics that will be announced at WWDC 2026 - you obviously can’t propose such a talk now, but we will look for some additional talks in these areas in June/July 2026. An example from 2024 was the VisionPro workshop by developers from the Imaginary Institute.
Important topics
Accessibility and privacy are good examples of topics that we all need to know about and that aren’t going away. We usually have several talks on these kinds of topics. However, a basic talk saying “accessibility is important” is unlikely to cut it. We all know that. Robin Kanatzar's talk "Zero to accessible in 30 minutes" made the 2024 programme by showing how to identify and fix accessibility problems in a specific app (the iOSDevUK app).
Technical experience talks
Talks that say how issues such as testing or user login or networking are handled in practice. Examples from 2024 are “Getting the most from Swift Macros” by Daniel Steinberg, or “Best in class Pull Request” by Danijela Vrzan.
Interesting aspects of iOS that we've always meant to look at
There are lots of features of iOS that many of us don't get around to using, but that deserve a wider audience. Examples might be “A journey into Live Activities” by Pol Paella Abadia, or “Creating a great speaker voice with speech synthesizer" by Mariam Fekri.
Wider software development interest
Talks don't have to be about Swift or even iOS. Most professionals have a wider interest in software development, so techniques such as dependency injection, or talks on design, or issues of large software development are of interest to most of us. Other areas that many of us care about are project management, marketing our apps, the challenges of being an indie developer, working in teams without killing your co-workers, architectures, interesting app areas. Examples from 2024 might be “AB test everything” by Matt Heaney or “Unleashing the revenue potential of your iOS app” by Marcelo Laprea.
We hope that has given you some idea of the breadth of talks that are of interest.
Extra Tip
We ask for a talk title and a talk description. Some talks get rejected because they have a clever title, but give little indication of what the talk content will be. Use the talk description to give a summary of what you are going to do with the 30 minutes of your talk - what are the main things you will cover? The more detail you can give, the better - it reassures that you have more than a clever title.