How to Get a Mobile App for Your EasyChair Conference

EasyChair handles everything before the event, and its smart program is enough to build the attendee app from. This guide covers how — link first, exports as the fallback — and what to require from the mobile layer, for an audience that will absolutely notice if you get it wrong.

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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.

What EasyChair does publish is the smart program: the final programme as a small public website, one page per day, with every talk, author and abstract. That website is enough to build the attendee app from. No export is needed unless your programme is not public — and this guide covers both paths.

The gap 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 reads a smart program: 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 public smart program: the final programme as web pages, with abstracts
  • 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 that work on a phone
  • 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 Connect Your EasyChair Programme

There are two paths. The first is a link and takes about 30 seconds. The second is the older export procedure, and it is still the right one when your smart program is not public.

Path A — the smart-program link (recommended)

Once your timetable is scheduled, EasyChair publishes the smart program at an address of the form https://easychair.org/smart-program/<your-conference>/. It is a small site with four kinds of page, and each carries something the app needs:

  • The overview page, with every day of the programme inline
  • One page per day: sessions with time intervals, chairs and rooms; every talk with its time, authors, presenter and full abstract
  • One page per person, with affiliation and, where entered, a bio and photo
  • One page per room, with capacity and the sessions held there

Paste that address on the try-free page with your email, click the confirmation link we send, and a private preview of your conference is built in about 30 seconds — real sessions, real papers, real rooms — with a join code you can hand to the programme committee. HEPCon reads the pages one request at a time with a pause between them, keeps every session, paper, person and room under its EasyChair id, and re-reads the same link whenever the programme changes.

Check one thing before pasting: that the smart program is published and public. If opening the address in a private browser window shows your programme, it is.

Path B — exports (when the smart program is not public)

Some conferences keep the programme behind a login until late, or never publish a smart program. EasyChair has no single "export everything" button, so the fallback is two exports combined by paper ID:

  1. The programme schedule. In the chair console, Programme > Timetable exports the schedule as CSV or XLSX: session names, dates, times, rooms, and the paper IDs, titles and presenters in each slot.
  2. Accepted papers with abstracts. Submissions > All Submissions, filtered to accepted, exported as CSV or XLSX: paper IDs, titles, authors, affiliations and abstract text.
  3. Invited talks, if they were never submissions: a short list with speaker, affiliation, title, abstract and session.

Send the files with the event basics (dates, venue, logo, colour) and the preview is built within 48 hours. Everything after that — re-sync on a new export, materials, push notifications — is the same as on the link path.

What to Require From a Mobile App for EasyChair

Reads the smart program directly

The mobile layer should take your smart-program link and build from it — not ask you to reformat a spreadsheet to its template. If the vendor's answer to "EasyChair" is "send us a CSV", you are doing their integration work for them, and you will do it again after every programme change.

Keeps EasyChair's identities across updates

Every session, paper and person in EasyChair has a stable id. The app should keep it, so that a re-import after a schedule change updates records in place and an attendee's favourites and reminders survive. An app that rebuilds from scratch on every update loses exactly the state your attendees care about.

Full-text search across all abstracts, offline

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. The smart program's day pages carry the abstracts; require that search reaches them, offline.

Handles large, multi-institution author lists

Machine learning papers often have many co-authors across institutions. The app should show every author as a person with an affiliation and a page listing their other papers at the conference — not a truncated string on a session card.

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.

Re-sync from the same link, with push for changes

When the programme changes in EasyChair, the smart program changes with it. Require that the app re-reads the same link and applies only the difference, and that a room or time change can reach installed phones as a push notification — the one thing a web page cannot do.

The Setup Process for EasyChair Events

  1. Schedule the timetable in EasyChair so the smart program is published.
  2. Paste the smart-program link on the try-free page and click the confirmation link we send. The preview is ready in about 30 seconds; if your venue is outside Central European time, tell us the zone once.
  3. Share the join code with the programme committee so they can open the preview on their own phones and check sessions, papers, abstracts and author lists across all tracks.
  4. Evaluate for as long as you need. The go-live decision is due one week before the conference; until then the preview follows the smart program as it changes.
  5. Go live, and keep editing in EasyChair. The preview becomes the event; re-sync carries every later change, and materials such as accepted papers can be attached to their talks.

No public smart program? Path B above: two exports, and a live preview within 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.

Related reading

Ready to give your EasyChair conference a proper attendee experience?

Paste your smart-program link and browse your own conference in about 30 seconds — full programme, all abstracts, personal schedules included. No smart program yet? Send the exports.

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