Mobile Dev KA: Rust on Mobile: Comparing JNI, UniFFI, and Flutter Rust Bridge
Details
There are compelling reasons to reach for Rust in mobile development. Maybe you depend on a library that only exists in Rust, your company has shared code running across multiple platforms, or you simply want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your app without the complexity of C++. In all these cases, Rust presents itself as the obvious choice. While newer languages like Zig and Mojo are on the horizon, the Rust ecosystem has matured to the point where entire companies now rely on it in production.
This talk does not take the usual Rust Evangelist route of praising its memory safety features and how the compiler helps you write code that never fails during runtime. Instead, it is a practical guide to how Rust can be integrated into Android development alongside Kotlin, or adopted as part of a multiplatform strategy using frameworks like Flutter. Along the way, we explore the tools that make this possible: JNI, UniFFI, and the Flutter Rust Bridge, examining how they are used in practice, how they work under the hood, and the tradeoffs each one brings to the table.
________Markus Knoch studied Automation Engineering for his Bachelor's degree before pursuing a Master's in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, where he gradually shifted his focus towards computer science and machine learning. For his Master's thesis at movisens, he developed an Android app built with Jetpack Compose and Kotlin, incorporating machine learning models in the audio domain. Following his thesis, he continued at movisens, further deepening his experience in audio machine learning and mobile app development.
In May 2025, he joined KENBUN, where he works as a mobile developer building apps in Kotlin and Flutter, while also contributing to the training and evaluation of machine learning models. At KENBUN he was introduced to Rust and began exploring how it could be leveraged in mobile development, a journey that ultimately led to this talk
Agenda
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Hosted By
Martina Kraus, Organizer
Christian Liebel, Organizer
Christian Janz, Organizer
Aydin Mir Mohammadi, Organizer
Tanja Ulianova, Organizer
Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-karlsruhe-presents-mobile-dev-ka-rust-on-mobile-comparing-jni-uniffi-and-flutter-rust-bridge/.