How to Get a Mobile App for Your EasyChair Conference
EasyChair handles everything before the event. This guide covers what you need to add a proper on-site mobile experience — for an audience that will absolutely notice if you don't.
EasyChair is the world's most widely used conference management system for computer science, AI, and machine learning events. It handles paper submissions, reviewer assignments, programme committee decisions, and author notifications without requiring any technical setup from organisers. It does all of this well.
Then the event starts — and EasyChair's job is over. There is no attendee app. There is no offline agenda. There is no personal schedule, no push notifications, no full-text search across the accepted papers. There is a web page with a table of sessions that does not work on a phone.
This is a known gap, and it matters more at EasyChair conferences than anywhere else — because your attendees are the people who build the products that define modern digital experience. They know what a good conference app looks like. They will also know, quietly, when yours is missing one entirely.
Already decided? See how HEPCon handles EasyChair exports: EasyChair Conference App solution.
The EasyChair Attendee Gap in Detail
To understand what you're adding when you bring in a mobile layer, it helps to map exactly what EasyChair provides — and doesn't — once the programme is set.
What EasyChair provides
- Paper submission and author management
- Review assignment and decision workflow
- Author notifications and camera-ready submission
- Programme committee tools
- A web-based schedule page for the final programme
- Proceedings export
What EasyChair doesn't provide
- Native mobile app for attendees
- Offline access to the programme
- Personal schedule or bookmarking
- Push notifications for room changes
- Full-text search across papers and abstracts
- Poster session navigation
- Speaker profiles with bios and affiliations
- Venue maps and room navigation
This isn't a criticism of EasyChair — it does what it's designed for very well. The programme and scheduling side is a solved problem. The attendee side is yours to solve.
How to Export Your EasyChair Programme
EasyChair doesn't have a single "export everything" button. Getting a complete programme dataset requires two separate exports that you then combine or hand off to a mobile app provider.
Export 1: The Programme Schedule
In the EasyChair chair console, go to Programme > Timetable. Once your sessions are scheduled, there is a download option that exports the schedule as a spreadsheet (CSV or XLSX). This contains:
- Session names, dates, start/end times, and room assignments
- Paper IDs and titles assigned to each session slot
- Presenter or speaker names per slot
This export becomes the skeleton of your mobile timetable.
Export 2: Accepted Papers with Abstracts
The schedule export typically contains titles only, not abstract text. To get full abstracts, go to Submissions > All Submissions, filter to accepted papers, and export as CSV/XLSX. This produces a file with paper IDs, titles, author names, affiliations, and abstract text.
Matching these two exports by paper ID gives the mobile app provider everything needed to build a searchable, full-content programme.
Export 3: Invited Talks (if applicable)
Invited speakers and keynotes are often managed outside EasyChair — in a spreadsheet or email thread — rather than as submissions. Prepare a separate list with: speaker name, affiliation, talk title, abstract, and session assignment. This ensures your invited programme appears in the app alongside the accepted papers.
What to Require From a Mobile App for EasyChair
Accepts CSV/XLSX imports directly
Since EasyChair doesn't have a live API, the mobile layer must work with spreadsheet exports. Confirm the app accepts ConfTool/EasyChair-format spreadsheets natively — not just "CSV support" that requires you to manually reformat columns to a specific template.
Matches papers to sessions by paper ID
EasyChair uses paper IDs consistently across exports. The mobile app should join your schedule export and your paper list export by paper ID automatically — not require you to manually merge them in a spreadsheet.
Full-text search across all abstracts
Attendees at CS/AI conferences use search constantly. Finding a paper on a specific topic across 300 accepted submissions should take two seconds — not require knowing the session name. Offline full-text search across all abstract content is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Handles large, complex author lists
Machine learning papers often have many co-authors across multiple institutions. The app should display all authors and affiliations cleanly, and ideally allow browsing other papers by the same author.
Personal schedule and bookmarking
CS conferences typically have dense parallel tracks. Attendees plan their schedule before and during the event. Personal schedule bookmarking is non-negotiable for a technically literate audience who will use it actively.
Real offline capability
Conference centre Wi-Fi, hotel lobby networks, and international roaming are all unreliable. The programme should be fully available — searchable, browsable, personal schedule intact — with no network connection.
The Setup Process for EasyChair Events
- Export the programme schedule from EasyChair's timetable view (CSV/XLSX).
- Export accepted papers with abstracts from EasyChair's submissions view.
- Prepare invited speaker information separately if not in EasyChair (name, affiliation, talk title, abstract, session).
- Share both files plus event metadata (dates, venue, logo, colour) with the mobile app provider.
- Review the generated preview. Check that sessions, papers, abstracts, and author lists imported correctly across all tracks.
- Go live and update as needed. For EasyChair events, most changes happen at the paper and session level. A re-export and re-import is typically needed once before the conference to catch final programme updates.
With HEPCon, the process from receiving your EasyChair exports to a live preview is 48 hours. See: How to get started.
Why This Matters More at EasyChair Conferences
EasyChair is used at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, and hundreds of affiliated workshops and symposiums. The attendees at these events are machine learning researchers, software engineers, and computer scientists. They build the apps that the rest of the world uses. They will instantly notice:
- A conference with no mobile experience
- An app with slow search
- A schedule that breaks when Wi-Fi is slow
- Any experience that feels lower quality than the tools they use every day
Conversely, a fast, clean, offline-capable app creates a noticeably positive impression. In a community where word spreads quickly, the conference experience is part of your brand.
This isn't about impressing people. It's about not creating unnecessary friction at an event your programme committee worked hard to build.
Ready to give your EasyChair conference a proper attendee experience?
Share your EasyChair schedule and paper exports. We'll have a live preview ready in 48 hours — full programme, all abstracts, personal schedules included.
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