iPhone people and Android people have strong opinions about everything, including deadline tracking. Here's the good news: for this job, the platform barely matters.
A conference deadline tracker app does four things on both iOS and Android. Stores deadlines, fires alerts, syncs with a calendar, filters by discipline. iOS versions tend to be prettier. Android versions tend to be more customizable. Neither difference decides whether your paper gets submitted. What decides it is whether you turned the alerts on and left them on. That's the entire comparison, really.
The real comparison is elsewhere. Free apps live on ads and limited venue lists. Paid apps, or the free tier of a lab deadline dashboard SaaS, buy you coverage and customization. If you're one PhD student tracking five conferences a year, free is fine. If you're a postdoc running three projects or a PI herding a lab, the dashboard pays for itself the first time it catches a deadline your student forgot. Ask me how I know.
A mobile app for academic submission deadlines is only as good as its data. Before you commit, check two things: does it cover your discipline, and how fresh are the dates? A tracker listing last year's deadlines with total confidence is worse than no tracker at all, because it teaches you not to trust the alerts.
Whatever you download, pair it with the academic conference deadline tracker calendar at confjournal.fyi, which lists conference submission deadlines with dates, locations, and links. Treat the app as the alarm clock, not the calendar.
And when the paper is ready, confjournal.fyi will get it submission-ready with paper formatting and submission checks for your target venue.