Build Smarter Mobile Apps: Unlocking the Power of Google’s Gemini models and Firebase Genkit

Mobile apps are evolving – they need to be intelligent, responsive, and personalized for every user. Ready to build the next generation of mobile experiences? Join Firebase and Google Cloud experts to explore how Google’s Gemini models and Firebase Genkit can supercharge your mobile app with AI features.

This hands-on workshop focuses on building an intelligent backend for mobile apps, created using Firebase Genkit and powered by Gemini models. We'll demonstrate this by developing a personal knowledge management mobile app. This app will allow users to save articles for later reading, access summarized versions of those articles, and query their knowledge base with questions related to the stored content.

Leave with practical insights to start building your own AI-powered mobile apps today!

The landscape of generative AI for iOS developers

AI is the hot new stuff, and it’s constantly evolving. With Apple entering the arena, we can expect a number of exciting changes / possibilities / features / opportunities that will enable iOS developers to add amazing new experiences to their apps. In this talk, we will take a look at the current landscape of AI for iOS developers.

Specifically,

- An introduction to LLMs and how they work
- An overview of current commercial and open source LLMs and their differences
- How to call LLMs from your app
- How to secure your API keys
- Prompting strategies
- How to leverage your app’s data for AI
- How to build complex, AI-driven workflows

We will cover LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, Ollama, Apple’s MLX, and tools like LangChain and [redacted].

This session will include stuff that is not yet released - both from Apple and Google.

Building Reusable SwiftUI Components

SwiftUI makes it easy to create beautiful UIs in no time, but it is just as easy to end up with a giant view that mixes view code and business logic. Fortunately, Apple gave us some tools to keep the bloat in check and write maintainable and reusable code.

In this talk, I am going to show you how to

* refactor an existing SwiftUI view to make it more maintainable,
* turn it into a reusable SwiftUI component,
* add event handling,
* make the view configurable,
* make the view styleable
* add it to the Xcode component library,
* turn it into a shareable component that can be consumed via Swift Package Manager,
* and distribute it via GitHub and the Swift Package Index

Slides for this talk: https://speakerdeck.com/peterfriese/building-reusable-swiftui-components-98b3272c-3056-44ad-879c-2780c1f89e2d

I can also deliver this talk as a workshop, based on the DocC tutorial I wrote for it: https://peterfriese.github.io/Building-SwiftUI-Components-Tutorial/tutorials/tutorial-table-of-contents/

🍏 + 🔥 = ❤️ (Firebase for Apple developers)

In this talk, I am going to walk you through the building blocks for creating modern applications on Apple’s platforms using SwiftUI and Firebase.

We will cover the following topics:

- Setting up an architecture for data-driven applications
- What’s new in SwiftUI’s application life cycle
- Syncing data in realtime across multiple devices with Cloud Firestore
- Mapping Firestore documents in a type-safe way using the Codable protocol
- Using Combine to fetch data from remote APIs and Firebase
- How async/await (new in Swift 5.5) will affect the way we write asynchronous code (plus some surprises in Firebase's code base)

Firebase is always evolving, so I will also talk about how we’re making use of Apple’s latest technologies in our own code base, for example

- Combine
- async/await
- SwiftUI view modifiers

No matter if you’re a seasoned Firebase user or just wondering what it is all about, you should leave this session with a deeper understanding of what Firebase it and how you can use it your apps on Apple’s platforms.

Add superpowers to your iOS and Android app(s) with Cloud Functions for Firebase

Building amazing mobile apps has become a lot easier thanks to modern UI frameworks like SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose.

But sometimes, you need to run some code on the server

* to orchestrate API calls
* to write business logic once, and use from all your mobile clients
* for long running process that you don’t want to run on the client

However, setting up your own server sounds like a lot of work, and like a maintenance nightmare.

Cloud Functions for Firebase to the rescue! Cloud Functions allow you to build a serverless backend. They automatically scale to your application’s needs, and you can call them from your mobile app, and in response to events in other Firebase services, such as when a new user is created (or deleted), or a document was written to Cloud Firestore, and much more!

In this talk, you will learn what Cloud Functions are, what the benefits of using them are, the step-by-step of calling these functions from other Firebase products and how to use them in your Android and iOS apps.

5 Firebase Features That Will Make You a More Productive Developer

In this talk, I will cover five Firebase features that many developers don’t know about which will make your life easier and will make you a more productive developer.

In particular, I will show you how to

* Create a smooth onboarding experience using Anonymous Auth
* Map Firestore documents to / from Swift using the Codable protocol
* Fetch data from Firestore with just a single line of code using the FirestoreQuery property wrapper
* Develop locally using the Firebase Emulator Suite
* Call Firebase APIs using async/await

This talk focuses mostly on iOS / Apple developers, but developers targeting Android and the web will benefit as well.

How I used Siri, PaLM, LangChain, and Firebase to create an Exobrain

In our fast paced world, there is just too much information, and it often seems impossible to keep up with everything that’s going on.

If you ever felt that you couldn’t possibly remember everything you saw, read, or even didn’t read, come to this talk and I will show you how I build an app that allows me to do just that.

I will show you how I
- used SwiftUI to build a beautiful app that works across Apple’s platforms
- used Cloud Firestore to store gigabytes of data, keeping it in sync across all of my devices
- used the PaLM API to summarise articles, and ask my app questions about articles
- used LangChain to connect PaLM to my personal data store
- Use Siri to provide a natural language interface that allows me to query my knowledge base hands-free

Slide deck: https://speakerdeck.com/peterfriese/how-i-used-siri-palm-langchain-and-firebase-to-create-an-exobrain

One more thing - How to create insanely great slides using Keynote

So, your talk got accepted at one of the big iOS conferences, and you’ve started working on your talk. You’ve got a great story line, and some amazing demos - but what about them slides?

Let’s face it - we all love lickable slides, but creating them is a TON of work, and only the likes of Apple can afford putting in the time and effort to create truly amazing slides.

Or can they?

Let me take you behind the scenes and show you how you can create amazing slides without hiring a graphic designer, an illustrator, and a professional photographer.

In this talk, I will show you how to

- Go beyond the built-in animations to create animated sequences that will wow your audience
- Easily animate objects on your slides without losing your mind
- Highlight parts of your slides to direct your audience’s attention
- Create slide decks that appear as if your watching somebody type out a text - super useful for all of us developers who want to showcase our work.
- Create custom shapes that you can easily animate
- Customise Keynote for ultimate productivity

After having experienced this talk, you will never create boring slides again.

While this is not a coding-focused session, I believe this will be immensely valuable for anyone who is considering giving presentations at conferences or meet-ups. I will share the techniques I've been using over more than a decade of presenting at international conference - the same techniques Apple (and Google) use in their presentations at their tentpole events.

This is going to be a live demonstration. I will show how to re-recreate some animated slides from existing presentations of my own, as well as some slides from WWDC presentations.

To make sure this works, I need a desk I can sit at, and enough place to use a keyboard and a mouse. A regular pedestal will *NOT* work.

How I used Siri, Gemini, LangChain, and Firebase to create an Exobrain

In our fast paced world, there is just too much information, and it often seems impossible to keep up with everything that’s going on.

If you ever felt that you couldn’t possibly remember everything you saw, read, or even didn’t read, come to this talk and I will show you how I build an app that allows me to do just that.

I will show you how I

* used SwiftUI to build a beautiful app that works across Apple’s platforms (including VisionPro)
* used Cloud Firestore to store gigabytes of data, keeping it in sync across all of my devices
* used Gemini, Google's LLM, to summarise articles, and ask my app questions about articles
* used LangChain to connect Gemini to my personal data store
* used Siri to provide a natural language interface that allows me to query my knowledge base hands-free

Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/peterfriese/how-i-used-siri-palm-langchain-and-firebase-to-create-an-exobrain