Hi, I wrote the new course. We have been enabling the use of Rust in the Android Platform.
Roughly speaking, the Android Platform is the Linux distribution running below the Android apps we all know. There are a number of daemons running on the system and these are often written in C++. We've now made it possible for Android engineers to write them in Rust instead (or to link in Rust libraries if they want). To do this, the Android build system had to be extended with new rules, see https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/rust/building-ru....
The overall goal is to have more secure software. Rust removes a whole class of possible security vulnerabilities and we deploy it to make phones more secure. See https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... for details on that.
Android apps are already compiled to native code, being faster or slower is a matter of developer skills, and how much they paid attention to algorithms and data structures lectures.
It feels logical because Rust is close to the metal, but I don't know enough Android or Rust to be sure.