Right, as with other complicated low level systems, Android sees an annoying but seemingly unending stream of bugs that would be either impossible or unlikely if you used Rust.
I expect replacing low-level C++ with Rust to result in improved platform reliability as well as reduced security bugs.
For every weird memory safety bug that is usefully exploitable there are a hundred more that just mysteriously break things and may be very difficult for a human to spot. My WebAuthn tests broke on my Pixel 2 on Saturday, I spent about an hour trying to debug the problem, wondering why it was happening now but not before and why it didn't affect other platforms - then I rebooted the phone and it went from reporting a "NotReadableError" about the secure local storage to just working.
That's exactly right. Today, the focus is on making it possible to use Rust to write pieces of the Android platform itself.
Certainly, there are some _apps_ on Android today that use Rust (shout-out to my Firefox friends!), but that's not something I'm investing in right now.
I haven't personally done it, but given Rust can call C and be called like C, I don't know why not. I do know that Rust is being used in Android apps like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 app, but I don't know if those make ndk calls or not.
> now supports the Rust programming language for developing the OS itself.
So, this seems to be about in Android, not building apps for Android.
Guess we'll see with more posts!