[nevi-me]

> We believe that this is the largest rollout globally of any library written in Rust.

I suppose this is true because there's more phones using WhatsApp than there are say Windows 11 PCs.

Given that WhatsApp uses libsignal, is it safe to assume that they haven't been using the Rust library directly?

[marisen]

WhatsApp doesn't use libsignal, and Android is already pretty Rusty and deployed more than WhatsApp around the world (not just smartphone. Tons of "embedded" use cases also run on custom Android)

[charcircuit]

>deployed more than WhatsApp

If you count old Android versions before Rust was added.

[fabrice_d]

WhatsApp was using libsignal (the C version) when I worked on the KaiOS integration in 2017/2018.

[pjmlp]

Like our gym devices that have a full tablet to run a basic application to control weights, talk about wasting money.

[g947o]

It doesn't make sense for that device alone, but the vendor probably supplies all the different equipment in the gym. Using a tablet simplifies their supply chain, deployment, debugging/repair, app update process and simply supports more features. There are probably some connectivity features on the device, for example. When you look at all of that together, it's hard to argue it's wasting money.

It's like complaining about Electron apps. For sure I love small native apps like everyone else. But, if Electron enables a company to ship cross-platform apps and iterate faster, who am I to say no?

(I happen to have seen some of those tablets in diagnostic mode and poked around a bit. These things are much more complicated than you think.)

[rswail]

Once you price in the cost of integration, plastics, ROHS, CE and other regulatory/certifications, the extra cost of an Android tablet which already has a lot of that starts to make sense.

If you also add in the extra ease of things like device management across fleets etc, it becomes a no-brainer for the manufacturer.

[jerf]

The major problem with sticking an Android tablet on to exercise equipment is the difference in life spans. Android tablets are generally going to last you 4-5 years. Weight equipment should be able to last decades. There is some simple & cheap hardware that can last decades, but it is legitimately harder to program.

Even worse was an article some months back about Android tablets hooked to heating & cooling systems expected to last 20 years. There's no way those things are making it at scale.

[g947o]

> Weight equipment should be able to last decades.

"should" or "actually can"? Do you have references to show that's the actual lifespan of the equipment, mechanically?

[jerf]

Weight training equipment lasts decades all the time. It's just big piles of metal, it's not hard to get right.

What actually prompted the engineering-CYA "should" is if the Android tablet is controlling some sort of robotic system for selecting weight sizes, that that system might have an expected life span on par with a tablet, being a physical thing moving around some pins or something in a potentially hostile user environment. That'll break long before anything else would.

[pjmlp]

Well, doesn't look like to me, and a plain ESP32 with a touch screen would do the job for displaying a weight bar with plus, minus and reset count buttons.

[usrusr]

And then you get to a cardio unit where you want a completely different set of features and have to start over. Going lean on hardware only makes sense when you push out a very high number of units, when you have to deal with battery constraints or when you just have a lot of intertia, the combination of existing codebase and developer filter skillset.

[pjmlp]

Except all the machines have the same feature set I mentioned.

Agree that wanting to hire cheap developers is why they did it that way, the current interface is so laggy that I would bet it is Web based, on top of running Android for nothing.

[miki123211]

And then you start selling in a country which demands accessibility for your equipment. Good luck getting a 20+ language human-sounding TTS system on your ESP32.

[pjmlp]

If you watch "Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges" it appears the whole effort is more on the Azure side, and besides some timid adoption like GDI regions, there is a lukewarm adoption of Rust on Windows side, still pretty much a C and C++ feud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgptLwP588