How Rust is Making Android Safer: Memory‑Safety Gains Revealed

According to the latest TIOBE index, Rust remains in the top‑20 programming languages, alongside Python, Java, JavaScript, and Swift, and is gaining deeper trust from Google.

Android’s security issues, such as memory‑safety bugs, buffer overflows, and sandbox‑escape vulnerabilities, have been decreasing. Google reports that the number of memory‑safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 in 2019 to 85 in 2022.

This decline is mainly due to Google’s decision to use Rust instead of traditional languages for new Android code. Rust enforces strict memory safety, reducing the likelihood of memory‑related security problems. Its notable advantage is providing solutions to the memory faults and concurrency challenges that trouble many C/C++ developers.

The TIOBE index confirms Rust’s position in the top 20, alongside Python, Java, JavaScript, and Swift.

Google’s official blog also notes that the proportion of Android’s total vulnerabilities that were memory‑safety related dropped from 76% in 2019 to 35% in 2022, and in 2022 memory‑safety issues were no longer the largest category of Android bugs.

Although Rust does not add new features every year, the percentage of Rust code in Android is steadily increasing.

Related reading:

Google showcases KataOS, a security‑focused OS built with Rust

7 Reasons to Love and Hate Rust

Microsoft Achieves What Google Couldn’t