I'm hoping this can be a reality sooner rather than later. But we're definitely lacking in manpower willing or able to work on the more foundational pieces. Winit in particular is sadly undermaintained. 1 or 2 people working full time on Winit and/or other platform integration pieces would do wonders for the ecosystem.

The compelling use case would be sharing business logic between iOS/Android/desktop/web. If you can write core logic in Rust once and have thin UI layers per platform, that's valuable. But Iced's UI abstraction needs to be good enough that you're not fighting platform-specific behaviors constantly. Flutter tried this approach and succeeded commercially but still gets criticized for "not feeling native" on either platform.

Performance is where this could shine. Rust + Iced should theoretically have lower memory overhead and faster startup than the Kotlin runtime + Compose. For apps that manipulate large datasets locally (photo editors, video editors, CAD tools), avoiding GC pauses matters. But for typical CRUD apps that are 90% API calls and list scrolling, I doubt users would notice the difference.

The real barrier is developer experience. Kotlin has incredible IDE support via IntelliJ/Android Studio, instant hot reload, comprehensive documentation, and thousands of libraries. Rust's mobile tooling is immature by comparison. Unless you're already a Rust shop building a performance-critical app, the learning curve probably isn't justified. I'd love to be proven wrong though - more competition in the mobile development space would be healthy.

https://github.com/redbadger/crux

I'd like to try iced, but switched to egui on the official Android support.