Also, a strong point of Rust is just the way the types and the defaults are. Most people think the borrow checker is the only major thing, but Rust have this features:
* Plain Structs
* Rich enums (aka: Algebraic types) that leads to
* All replacements to nulls (Option, Result, Default(trait), Empty(idiom))
* Immutability and functional style as preferred when sensible
* Consistency in APIs by proxy of traits (all conversions going with Into/From traits, All iterables can .collect into all containers, etc)
and many things like this that make very productive to build good APIs when you get the handle of it.
Dunno what motivated them internally, but the bluetooth vulns that made news in Feb 2020 would have been prevented by safe Rust. See my comment from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265572
According to dtolnay, there are only 4 lines of unsafe rust in the Rust component. It's a bit small though at the current moment in time, with 4 thousand lines. Most of the code is still C++. Note that it's "with Rust" in the headline, not "in Rust".
I did a quick look on androidxref and saw a lot more .rs files than I expected. I haven't worked in Android frameworks stuff since around 5.0. I knew not too long after I left that world they started adding some minimal rust stuff, but looks like its grown a bit. Exciting. It's a perfect fit.