What the World's Largest Mobile Dev Conference Taught Me About Selling Apps Worldwide
💡 TL;DR
At next.app devCon 2026, the talks on selling apps agreed: even small apps sell worldwide. Open pre-orders early, make localization part of every release, and set prices people in each country can afford.
I spent three days in Berlin, October 7 to 9, 2026, at next.app devCon, the world's largest conference for mobile app developers: 6,000 developers, eight conferences under one roof and 419 sessions. Most of the agenda was about AI writing our code, and I wrote about that side on X and LinkedIn.
This post is about the other thread I followed as an app publisher: how apps get found, launched and paid for in every country. A handful of talks and two lunches had more to say about it than I expected.
Your downloads are global from day one
Angelo Cammalleri, an Apple platforms developer who ships a small portfolio of his own apps next to consulting work, showed a map of where his downloads come from: 1,362 downloads in one month across all his apps, from all over the world.
Even a small indie portfolio sells everywhere. And once people in Brazil, India or Indonesia can find your app, the price they see decides whether they buy.
Both stores fill in a price for every country as soon as you set yours, but they convert by exchange rate and tax. They don't look at what people in each country can afford. I wrote about what the stores pick for you, and you can see what your own price looks like in each country with the free Price Localizer.
Launch interest builds up before release day
Angelo's launch playbook starts months before release. App Store pre-orders and Google Play pre-registration both notify people on launch day and can download the app automatically, so the interest you collect carries into day one. Two of his apps, Bluetooth Browser and Passable, collected 462 pre-orders between March and September.
The press part was just as practical. One short email that fits on one screen: why the app fits the writer's readers, the launch date, and a link to screenshots, pricing and a press kit. After a 9to5Mac Indie App Spotlight in July, Passable's MRR visibly jumped.
He also reminded the room that you can submit a featuring nomination in App Store Connect. Apple's editors choose the apps they highlight, and his slide listed what to include: the app or update, why it matters, and the release date.
From the pricing side, I'd add one step to that playbook. A launch spike is the worst moment to have the wrong price in half the world, so set your country prices before release day, and the traffic from every country lands on a price that makes sense. I covered the details in pre-orders, pre-registration and day-one prices.
Localization belongs in every release
Marcel Pintó, Head of Mobile at Holafly, showed how the team ships its app in 18+ languages about every two weeks, from around 1,700 text keys. Developers build screens with plain English strings first. An agent skill extracts the keys, AI pre-translates them, and people translate and proofread before release. In his words, the release train doesn't stop for translations.
The slide on the cover of this post came from that talk: "German is longer. Your layout needs to know that before it ships." German UI text commonly runs 20 to 30% longer than English, so the layout limits travel with each string into the translation tool, and screenshot tests catch broken layouts before a release goes out.
Prices have the same problem. A price that looks right in the US can be too much in Brazil or India. And prices drift the way layouts break: exchange rates move, and a price that fit last year may not fit now. That's why price localization works best as part of the release process, checked every time something changes, the way Holafly checks translations. More on that in localization beyond translation and why set-and-forget pricing doesn't work.
Small teams can serve the whole world
In the talk on Gemini and Firebase AI Logic by Miguel Ramos and Rosário Fernandes, the case study was MacroFactor, a nutrition app where you log a meal by taking a photo. The slide: more than 400,000 subscribers, and an AI feature shipped by just two engineers, on Flutter, Firebase AI Logic, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Vertex AI.
Two engineers can ship a feature like that now. What a team that small can't do by hand is set and maintain a price for every country on two stores, for every subscription and every offer. That's exactly the kind of work I'd hand to automation.
Your next customer might be an agent
The "Beyond SaaS" talk by Alexander Günsche and Ulli Hinze from AWS listed six things AI agents check before they use a product: a marketplace listing, an MCP server, self-service sign-up, a free tier, every interface (web, mobile, voice and chat), and workflow steps that tools like n8n or Zapier can call.
Two of the six are pricing and packaging decisions: a free tier, and sign-up without talking to anyone. If agents start choosing tools for people, how you package and price your product will matter for being picked at all, as well as for conversion.
Two PricePush users, two opposite philosophies
The best part of the three days happened at lunch, with two PricePush users I'd only known online.
Stephan Lerner builds Monee, a budget tracker for iOS and Android, on the side, next to a full-time job and a family. It's free, with no ads, no tracking and no bank sync. The only money it makes comes from optional tips, from €0.99 to €11.99. It has 4.9 stars from more than 10,000 ratings on the German App Store, and on the Happy Bootstrapping podcast in March he talked about 16,000 daily active users.
Most of us would call that pricing model risky. It works because people trust the app and the person behind it, and Stephan answers his users himself. Even a tip jar has a pricing question in it, though: €0.99 is small change in Germany and a real decision in many other countries.
Viktor Borbély builds Calm Wealth, a free net worth tracker built around a two-minute weekly check-in, with no transaction logging and no bank connection. It takes the opposite view to Monee: stop logging every expense and look at the big number once a week. Two finance apps with opposite philosophies, and they agree on the part that matters: your data stays yours.
I also finally met Stanislav Sydorenko, a LinkedIn friend for a long time, who gave a Fluttercon talk on combining Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform. His side project Flymap shows an offline map of your flight, and it's growing thanks to the aviation videos he makes for Instagram.
What I took home
Most of the agenda was about how AI writes our code. The talks I'll use most as an app publisher were about everything around the code: getting found before launch, shipping in every language, and charging a price that makes sense in every country. AI helps with all of it, and someone still has to decide what good looks like and check the result.
Thanks to the next.app devCon team, and to Angelo, Marcel, Miguel, Rosário, Alexander and Ulli for talks I'll actually use.
If you sell apps on both stores, PricePush sets a price for every country based on what people there can afford and pushes it to the App Store and Google Play. Check your own app in the free Price Localizer, compare the plans, or start free.
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