The supported languages for app development will continue to be Kotlin, Java, C, and C++.Rust is in its 8th year and has now had over 300 content updates, with a guaranteed content patch every month. According to a member of the Android Developer Relations team, Google also does not plan to release a Rust NDK at the moment. This switch only affects how the OS is written. While not related to Android, Fuchsia's new netstack is also being written in Rust.įor app developers, the switch changes nothing about how you, as an app developer, write apps or how the framework APIs work. Android's Keystore 2.0 module is written in Rust, and so is the userspace portion of binder, Android's IPC driver. Work started on Gabeldorsche around the time of Android 11 but is still not in use yet. Android's new Bluetooth stack rewrite code-named ' Gabeldorsche' is being written in Rust. But even so, it is being made clear that scaling Rust support to more of the OS is a multi-year project.įrom what we can see, Google is already using Rust at a few places. Google has a few early adopter projects that they will be sharing in the coming months. Sandboxing also doesn't eliminate the code's vulnerabilities entirely, and its efficacy is reduced because of high bug density, further allowing attackers to chain multiple vulnerabilities. But sandboxes are expensive on resources, consuming additional overhead and introducing latency. The lack of memory safety guarantees forces developers to run Android processes within tightly constrained and unprivileged sandboxes. Merely fixing these bugs becomes insufficient to deal with the issue, and a better approach would be to prevent them in the first place. These memory safety bugs become the most difficult-to-address source of incorrectness of code, representing ~70% of Android's high severity security vulnerabilities. The developer is responsible for managing memory lifetime on these languages, but in complex and multi-threaded codebases, that is easier said than done.Ĭ and C++ together constitute tens of millions of lines of code on the Android platform. Unfortunately, C and C++ fail to provide memory safety guarantees, making them prone to bugs and security vulnerabilities.

These languages provide developers with control and predictability, which is important when accessing low-level system resources and hardware. Lower levels of the Android OS require systems programming languages like C and C++.

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