State, AI, and App Growth: What's Next in Mobile Development

This month, we will be at Hippo Digital with two fantastic talks.

1️⃣ State Without the Headache: Three Boundaries Every Flutter App Needs

State management in Flutter can start simply with "setState", then quickly become difficult to reason about as an application grows. This practical talk explores how to decide where state should live, who should own it, and how changes should flow through an application without making everything global.

Using a practical Flutter example, Ibim will show how an application can evolve from local state towards a cleaner, more scalable structure. The session will cover state ownership, local versus shared state, widget rebuilds, Provider, ChangeNotifier, Consumer and Selector, while also looking at broader principles such as separation of concerns, single source of truth and unidirectional data flow.

The aim is not to promote one state management solution, but to provide practical principles that developers can apply when deciding how to structure state in their own Flutter applications.

Ibim Braide is a software engineer and the organiser of Flutter Birmingham and Golang Birmingham. He has experience building web, mobile and desktop applications using technologies including Flutter, Dart, React, TypeScript and C#. He is particularly interested in application architecture, state management and building maintainable software, and enjoys contributing to and bringing together developer communities.

2️⃣ Shipped on Monday, Cloned by Friday. Which apps win in the age of AI?

A developer with a coding agent can ship a new feature on Monday. A competitor with the same agent can clone it by Friday. App Store submissions are up 84% in a year, downloads are flat, and assistants like ChatGPT now run third-party apps inside chat. So what makes a winning app in the age of AI, and which ones will ultimately come out on top? Charlie from Trophy, the platform behind streaks, achievements and leaderboards in consumer apps, looks at how the market got here and what data from over 250 million user interactions says about the apps whose users keep coming back. You'll leave with a clearer picture of where the industry could be heading and a short list of things to consider for your own app.

Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe is Co-Founder of Trophy, a platform that helps companies increase user engagement and retention with gamification.

Agenda

• 17:30 Event opens 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️
• 17:30 Food arrives 🍕
• 17:30 Eating and Networking 🍽️ 💬
• 18:00 Event starts 🎬
• 18:10 Talk from Ibim 🗣️
• 18:50 Talk from Charlie 🗣️
• 19:30 Event closes, optional drinks at The Brew Society 🍻