ai-app/RUST.md

# Moving the app to Rust

Working document for the question Iris asked on 2026-09-04: what are the
options for switching the phone app to Rust, ideally pure Rust with one UI
framework shared with a future winit-based desktop application, at full
feature parity and without giving up anything native, performance
especially. Constraints she set: no Dioxus and nothing that draws through a
WebView; **no UI DSL** (which rules out Makepad and Slint); the result
should stay lightweight; platform-specific pieces are fine to maintain;
reimplementing a framework piece from scratch where it does not fit is
fine; effort and elapsed time do not matter, long-term robustness does;
this clone is where things get tried before anything is committed to
`ai-app`. Her own library, [iris](https://github.com/cat16/iris), is the
**in-house framework to be built up** for this, with Masonry as the
yardstick it is measured against.

Decisions get a date and a reason here, the way `PLAN.md` does. A section
describes something that has been tried only where it says so, with a date.

## Keep this file current as you work

**This file is the handoff, and it is meant to let a session be cleared.**
Write each result into it *as you get it*, not at the end: the box ticked
or the reason it could not be, the measurement with its number, the
decision with its date and what it rejected, and anything that cost time to
find out. Then a session that has filled its context can be cleared and the
next one can pick up from this file alone, which is much cheaper than
carrying a long conversation or re-deriving what was already measured.

Two things that follow. Write for somebody who was not here — name the
command, the file and the number rather than "the fix" or "the earlier
run". And write the failures and the dead ends too: "Venus is blocked by
the emulator, not by Mesa" and "the present mode was not the cause" are
worth as much as the successes, because they are what stops the next
session spending an afternoon on them again.

## Where things stand (2026-09-04)

- **Done**: E0 (toolchain), E1 (Masonry on android-view, which found the
  keyboard gap — now explained, see below), I0a, I0b (iris builds on a
  pinned nightly and runs), I1 (parley + glyph atlas).
- **E1's keyboard gap is Masonry's `as_input_connection` returning `None`
  (a TODO), not android-view or `EditorInfo`.** android-view's own demo
  implements the `InputConnection` trait over a parley editor and gets
  real Gboard suggestions on this emulator — screenshotted 2026-09-04.
  android-view's `accesskit_android` adapter also has a reproducible abort
  (a client detaching, not attaching, is the trigger) — see E1 below for
  both, with the mitigation iris/I4 needs to carry.
- **Blocking, found 2026-09-04, before I2 can be called done**: iris's
  texture pipeline asks every device, unconditionally, for
  `VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing` ("bindless" binding arrays) — and a
  sourced check says a real share of Android hardware does not have it,
  not just the emulator's software renderer. See "iris's binding array
  does not survive real Android hardware" under the iris track for the
  measurement, the sources, and the recommended fix (generalize the
  glyph atlas to images, the same way I1 already did for text). Not yet
  implemented; a design decision to confirm before iris's render core
  changes.
- **Next**: decide on the atlas-based image fix above, then **I2** —
  iris on android-view. **E2** (a transcript in Masonry) can go in
  parallel in another session.
- **Not started**: `client-core`, which is item 1 of the recommendation
  below and does not depend on the framework choice. Nothing has been
  built for it, and it is not one of the numbered boxes — worth picking up
  in a session that wants work independent of the emulator.
- **The app itself is untouched.** Everything so far is in `iris/`, in
  `rigs/gpu-probe` (a headless wgpu/Vulkan feature probe, pushable to a
  device with no APK — see the binding-array section), and in the other
  rigs; nothing under `app/` or `server/` has changed.
- **Changed outside this repo**, both in `emulator-tools` and both pushed:
  `avd_serial` now validates its cache by asking the device its AVD name
  rather than by checking the serial is still attached (a recycled port
  silently pointed this checkout at another session's emulator), and
  `EMU_GPU=software` was added as an opt-in that keeps a run off the host
  GPU and gives the guest a software Vulkan device. The default is
  unchanged, because `-gpu host` was measured and the Compose benchmarks
  depend on it.

## What has to be reproduced

The app is ~19,000 lines of Kotlin. It splits three ways, and the split is
what decides how much of a port is mechanical.

**Pure logic with no Compose or Android in it, ~4,500 lines.** `Api.kt`
(1,142), `Events.kt`, `EventStream.kt`, `Sse.kt`, `TranscriptCache.kt`
(589, touches `java.io.File` only), `TranscriptSource.kt`,
`MarkdownSyntax.kt`, `Languages.kt`, `Highlighter.kt`, `Ansi.kt`,
`ResetCountdown.kt`, `Durations.kt`, `Sizes.kt`, `ModelName.kt`,
`LoadState.kt`, `ImportableStream.kt`. `TranscriptUnits.kt` and
`TranscriptItems.kt` (the event fold into rows, ~940 lines) are logic with
a handful of Compose annotations. This is also exactly the code that has
JVM unit tests today. All of it ports directly, and most of it already has a
Rust twin in `server/`: `Events.kt` is a hand-kept mirror of
`session/driver.rs`'s enum, the highlighter and the syntax scanner exist on
the server for the explorer, and the cache compares the server's own JSON
lines. **Sharing these types between server and app is the single largest
"keep things in sync" win available, and it does not depend on which UI
framework wins.**

**Compose UI, ~13,000 lines.** Screens, dialogs, the transcript list, the
markdown renderer's customisations, tool cards, the file explorer viewer and
editor. This is the part a UI framework choice is about.

**Android platform code, ~1,500 lines**, spread over 20 files. Every one of
these is a Java-side object that no Rust framework can replace, because
Android only offers them as Java classes:

- `NotificationService` — a **foreground service** holding the
  `/notifications` SSE stream while the app is closed, with its ongoing
  notification, `specialUse` type and the `POST_NOTIFICATIONS` request.
- `MainActivity` — edge-to-edge, the `ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK` runtime
  permission (Android 17), `singleTop` intent routing for `aiapp://enroll`,
  notification taps, and the **share sheet** (`ACTION_SEND`, any MIME type).
- `ServerConfig` — the bearer token sealed under an **Android Keystore**
  AES-GCM key, shared with Dev Updater through `wg-app-link`'s `:link`.
- `EnrollmentScanActivity` — the in-app **QR scanner** (zxing, camera).
- `Attachments` — `ContentResolver` reads of shared URIs, `BitmapFactory`
  decode and downscale, **EXIF** orientation.
- `SessionImage` — bitmap decode for produced images.
- `ScrollAnchor`, `Drafts` — `SharedPreferences`; `CrashLog` — `filesDir`.
- `TranscriptCache` — `cacheDir`.
- `DebugStats`/`FrameStats` — `Choreographer` frame timing and the render
  report; `runtime-tracing` names composables in a system trace.

So **"pure Rust" on Android means Rust owns every line of logic and
drawing, behind a thin shell of Java stubs**, and a packaging step that
produces a signed APK. How thin, and whether Gradle is inevitable, are
answered below.

### How much Java is unavoidable, and why

Rust can *call* any Android API through JNI (`jni` crate, with
`ndk-context` handing over the `JavaVM` and the Activity): posting a
notification, `startForegroundService`, the Keystore, `ContentResolver`
reads, permission requests, `WindowInsets`, the clipboard. None of that
needs a line of Kotlin. What JNI cannot do is *define* a class that the
system instantiates **by name from the manifest** — an `Activity`, a
`Service`, an `Application`, a `BroadcastReceiver`. Those must exist as dex
bytecode inside the APK before any Rust runs, because the framework
constructs them and only then calls into native code. `NativeActivity` is
the platform's own stub for the Activity case; there is no
`NativeService`, and android-view ships its own `View` subclass for the
same reason.

So the floor is roughly **two Java classes of ten lines each**: an
`Activity` and a `Service` whose lifecycle methods are declared `native`
and registered from `JNI_OnLoad`, plus whatever android-view already
provides. Everything they would have done in Kotlin — insets, intent
routing, the SSE follow loop, the notification builder — is Rust reached
through those stubs. Writing the stubs in Java rather than Kotlin drops
`kotlinc` from the toolchain; `javac` comes with the JDK Gradle already
needs. Generating the dex from Rust is not worth it: there is no mature
Rust dex writer, and the stubs never change.

### Can the APK be built without Gradle?

Yes. An APK is a zip containing a binary-XML `AndroidManifest.xml`,
`resources.arsc`, `classes.dex`, `lib/<abi>/*.so` and assets, aligned and
signed with the v2 scheme. The tools are `aapt2` (manifest and resources),
`d8` (Java bytecode to dex), `zipalign` and `apksigner`, all in the SDK's
`build-tools`, none of them Gradle. Three ways to drive them:

- **A `cargo xtask`** (or `build.rs`-adjacent script) that runs `cargo ndk`
  for each ABI, `javac` + `d8` for the stubs, `aapt2 link`, `zipalign`,
  `apksigner`. About 150 lines, every step visible, no AGP, no Gradle
  daemon holding 2.8 GB between builds. The pinned-CA constant becomes a
  `build.rs` reading the same `certs/ca.pem` path.
- **[cargo-apk2](https://github.com/mzdk100/cargo-apk2)**: the maintained
  successor to cargo-apk, and unlike it compiles `java_sources` /
  `kotlin_sources` into the dex and declares multiple activities **and
  services** with intent filters from `[package.metadata.android]`, with
  per-profile keystores and optional `aapt2`. Exactly the shape needed;
  the question is whether a third-party tool with one maintainer beats
  150 lines we own.
- **cargo-apk / xbuild**: unmaintained and `NativeActivity`-only. No.

What Gradle would take with it: Android Lint (which found two real bugs
here, but in Kotlin that would no longer exist — with forty lines of Java
stubs there is little left for it to find), manifest merging, R8, and the
generated-source plumbing. What it gives back: one toolchain, `cargo`
end to end, and Dev Updater keeps calling `build-apk.sh` exactly as now.
**Recommendation: the xtask**, with cargo-apk2 read for the details it
already got right (v2 signing, `uses-feature`, ABI splits).

### The behaviours that are hard to get back

Reading the Compose code for what a replacement must be able to express,
rather than what it happens to look like:

1. **The transcript is one selectable body of text.** One
   `SelectionContainer` around the whole lazy list, so a selection runs from
   a reply into the tool output beneath it. The framework needs selectable
   read-only rich text across many rows, with the platform's selection
   handles and clipboard on the phone.
2. **Rich inline text**: markdown with links (one tap detector per text,
   not a node per link), inline code chips drawn behind the text, tables
   with wrapping cells and a sideways scroll, syntax-highlighted fences,
   ANSI colour in tool output, Nerd Font icon glyphs. Needs a text layout
   engine with spans, not just styled labels.
3. **A bottom-anchored virtualised list of variable-height rows**, paged in
   both directions (800-event pages, `HISTORY_SCREENS` measured in
   viewports), with a saved scroll anchor per session, "hold the edge
   nearest the tap" when a row expands (`holdTopEdge`, done in the layout
   pass so the wrong frame is never drawn), and rows keyed so that a run of
   tool calls stays one row while it grows.
4. **The soft keyboard**: the composer resizes with the IME, the guard
   against a stuck inset animation, drafts per session, autocorrect and
   suggestions from the phone's own keyboard. This is where most Rust
   frameworks fail on Android today; see below.
5. **Platform integration through the app model**: foreground service,
   notifications, share sheet, deep link, Keystore, camera, back gesture,
   edge-to-edge insets, local-network permission.
6. **Accessibility names on icon buttons**, which the bench scripts depend
   on (`ui-trace` taps by label). A framework with no accessibility tree
   also breaks the measuring rig.
7. **Measurable frames**: the debug render report, and a way to attribute
   a frame's cost to a widget on the real phone.

## The two constraints that decide it

**1. Android text input.** Every framework built on `winit` inherits
winit's Android backend, and that backend cannot drive the soft keyboard
properly: the IME tracking issues
([#1823](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/1823),
[#2766](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/2766)) are open,
`ReceivedCharacter` is unimplemented on Android
([#2305](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/2305)), and the
`android-activity` groundwork for editor actions only merged in February
2026 ([PR #214](https://github.com/rust-mobile/android-activity/pull/214))
with the winit half still to come. Composition, autocorrect and suggestions
need an `InputConnection` implemented on the Java side, which winit's
`NativeActivity`/`GameActivity` model does not offer. The frameworks that
type on Android today each wrote their own Java glue (Slint, Makepad), and
the one designed to do it the way Android intends is
[`android-view`](https://github.com/rust-mobile/android-view): a Rust
implementation of an Android `View`, with text input through
`InputConnection`, accessibility, touch, callbacks on the UI thread, usable
either as a whole app or embedded beside ordinary Android components. It is
marked WIP. Both Linebender (its Masonry demo lives in that repo) and
Robius/Makepad ([Robrix's release notes](https://github.com/project-robius/robrix/releases)
say Android lacks a "full" keyboard and they are integrating android-view
for it) are converging on it. **That makes android-view the phone-side
foundation whichever widget set sits on top**, and the first thing to
build and measure here.

**2. Rich, selectable text and a virtualised list.** Frameworks group by
their text stack:

- **Parley + Fontique + Vello** (Linebender): rich spans, selection and
  editing utilities, IME support driven through `ui-events`, AccessKit text
  properties ([Linebender 2026 Q1](https://linebender.org/blog/tmil-25/),
  [parley](https://github.com/linebender/parley)). Used by Masonry/Xilem,
  and by Blitz. Vello proper needs compute shaders; `vello_hybrid` (CPU
  path processing, GPU compositing) is "roughly beta" and runs on GLES too,
  and Vello CPU exists as a no-GPU fallback.
- **cosmic-text** (iced, egui optionally): good layout, but the widgets on
  top decide selection. iced's `markdown` widget is not selectable
  ([discourse](https://discourse.iced.rs/t/markdown-widgets-text-should-be-selectable/1107)).
- **Slint's own**: `TextInput` with `read-only` is the selectable-text
  trick; there is **no inline rich text at all** (issue
  [#1325](https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/1325), markdown request
  [#6684](https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/6684) both open). A
  markdown transcript with links and code chips cannot be drawn.
- **Makepad's own**: GPU/SDF text, a `Markdown` widget and a virtualised
  `PortalList` in `makepad-widgets`.

## Options

### A. Keep Compose, move the logic into a Rust core (uniffi)

A `client-core` crate (events shared with the server, API client, SSE,
transcript fold, cache, markdown model, highlighter, ANSI) exposed to
Kotlin through [uniffi](https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs). Compose keeps
drawing. Desktop would be a second UI (iced or Compose Desktop) over the
same core.

- **For**: the logic and the wire types stop drifting from the server
  today, with tests in one language. Incremental and always shippable.
- **Against**: it is not what was asked for. The 13,000 lines of UI stay
  Kotlin, the desktop app shares no UI code, and the `:link` Kotlin module
  stays. uniffi's Kotlin Multiplatform bindings are a
  [community fork](https://github.com/UbiqueInnovation/uniffi-kotlin-multiplatform-bindings);
  the Android-only bindings are Mozilla's and solid.
- **Verdict**: not the destination, but **step one of every other option**
  is building this crate, so it costs nothing to keep it as the fallback.

### B. Slint

Rust on Android is officially supported (minSdk 26, `android-activity`
backend, own Java IME glue, safe areas and keyboard insets since 1.15,
Skia renderer needs `clang`). Royalty-free licence requires disclosing
Slint use; GPLv3 otherwise. UI is a separate `.slint` DSL, not Rust.

- **Against**: no rich inline text (see above), so the transcript cannot be
  drawn as it is today; the UI language is not Rust, which forfeits the
  "compiler catches it" motivation for the half of the code that is UI.
- **Verdict**: rejected on rich text alone.

### C. iced

Elm-style, Rust-only widgets, desktop-first, `winit` + `wgpu`. Has a
`markdown` widget and `rich_text` with links. The maintainer states mobile
is a non-goal ([iced](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced)); a community
Android example exists and its author could not get the soft keyboard
working, patched widgets for touch, and notes no accessibility
([HN thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46350641)). Markdown is
not selectable; `scrollable` is not virtualised.

- **Verdict**: a fine desktop toolkit and the one Iris named, but every
  phone-side gap (IME, touch, accessibility, selection, virtualisation)
  would be ours to build and maintain against a project that does not want
  them. Not the shared framework.

### D. egui

Immediate mode, `winit`-based on Android, AccessKit integration,
selectable labels across a `Ui`. Repaints only on input by default, so
battery is not the immediate-mode worry. Android IME is blocked on winit
([discussion](https://github.com/emilk/egui/discussions/2053)); the
workaround is an in-app virtual keyboard, which is exactly the
non-native keyboard to avoid. Variable-height virtualised lists are manual
(`show_rows` assumes uniform heights). Looks like egui, not Material.

- **Verdict**: workable on desktop, wrong on the phone for the same reason
  as iced, plus a look that would need a full custom style.

### E. Makepad

GPU-rendered, hybrid retained/immediate, `live_design!` DSL with hot
reload, MIT, 1.0 in 2025 ([makepad](https://github.com/makepad/makepad)).
Ships Android apps today with its own Java glue; Robrix (a Matrix chat
client, the closest analogue to this app) is its reference application on
Android, iOS and desktop. Has `Markdown`, `PortalList` (virtualised),
`TextInput`. Robrix reports the Android keyboard is not "full" and is moving
to android-view for it; the README says non-standard targets "may require
minor fixes".

- **For**: the only option that already ships a chat-shaped app on Android
  and desktop from one codebase, with the widgets this app needs.
- **Against**: the DSL is its own language with its own shader-based
  styling, so a large part of the UI would not be checked by rustc; the
  rendering model (SDF everything) is a different world from Compose's,
  and selection across a `Markdown` widget is unverified.
- **Verdict**: **rejected 2026-09-04** — Iris does not want a DSL. Kept
  here so its Android keyboard status stays a data point about
  android-view, not as an option.

### F. Masonry / Xilem on android-view (Linebender)

Retained widget tree (Masonry) with a reactive view layer (Xilem) that
reads like Compose; Rust all the way down; Vello, Parley, Fontique,
AccessKit, `ui-events`. Widgets include `Prose` (selectable read-only rich
text), `TextArea`, `VirtualScroll`, and this year `Svg`, `Split`,
`CollapsePanel`, a new layout system, and IME through `ui-events`
independent of winit. `masonry_android_view` exists in the android-view
repo and is "not yet generally usable"; Xilem calls itself experimental.
Desktop runs on winit. Vello needs a compute-capable GPU or falls back to
`vello_hybrid`/CPU.

- **For**: the only stack where every hard behaviour above maps onto a
  component designed for it: selection and rich text (Parley/Prose),
  virtualised variable heights (`VirtualScroll`), native IME
  (android-view's `InputConnection`), accessibility (AccessKit, now with an
  Android crate), one Rust widget language on both platforms. The team is
  the one writing the Android integration everyone else is adopting.
- **Against**: pre-1.0 with API churn each release; a small team; no
  Material widget set, so every control's look is ours; some of the pieces
  (`masonry_android_view`, `vello_hybrid`) are explicitly unfinished. Being
  early means fixing things upstream ourselves, which Iris said is
  acceptable.
- **Verdict**: **the option to try first**, because it is the only one
  whose gaps are "not finished yet" rather than "not designed for this".

### G. iris — the in-house library, and what "from scratch" means here

[cat16/iris](https://github.com/cat16/iris), read 2026-09-04 from the one
public commit (2026-01-31, "portfolio copy"; ~8,700 lines in `core`,
`macro` and the crate itself). Retained-mode widgets stored outside the
render tree, `wgpu` 28 directly, `winit` 0.30, `cosmic-text` 0.16 (parley
since I1), a
relative-anchor-plus-offset layout with `rest()` and `rel()` lengths, a
postfix builder API (`rect(..).radius(30).on(CursorSense::click(), ..)
.sized(..).align(..)`), events handled where the widget is declared, and
a single-threaded context passed explicitly — all of which reads like this
codebase's own rules. There is text editing (`widget/text/edit.rs`),
images, masks, spans and stacks; the TODO names text resizing as
per-frame slow and scaling as unsolved. It requires **nightly** (fourteen
`#![feature]` gates as vendored, among them `const_trait_impl`,
`unboxed_closures`, `portable_simd`, `associated_type_defaults`; eleven
after I0b and I1 — see those steps for the current list). Desktop only; no
Android surface, no IME, no accessibility tree, no virtualised list, no
rich-text selection.

**That list is the work, and some of it is done.** As of 2026-09-04 it
builds on a pinned nightly, runs on this machine's GPU, has parley and a
glyph atlas, and `iris-core` cross-compiles to Android. What it still
lacks from the list above is the Android surface, the IME bridge, the
accessibility tree and the virtualised list — I2, I3 and I4.

**iris is not a candidate to be tested as it stands. It is the in-house
library** (Iris, 2026-09-04): "essentially a good start to a rewrite from
scratch", to be maintained and extended by the sessions working here.
So the list above of what it lacks is a **work list, not a score**. When
the app needs something iris does not have, the answer is to build it
into iris. The layer iris has is the widget and layout layer; the layers
it needs are the same ones Masonry gets from android-view, Parley and
AccessKit, and there is no reason iris cannot sit on those same
foundations rather than reinvent them — the surface, the keyboard bridge
and the accessibility tree are platform plumbing, not a framework's
identity. The text stack was the first real design decision in that work,
and it is settled: **Parley, with a glyph atlas** (I1, 2026-09-04).

Two things to carry into that work honestly. Nightly is the opposite of
"holds up long term": a build that breaks on a toolchain update, on the
machine Dev Updater builds on, unattended. **Done in I0b** —
`iris/rust-toolchain.toml` pins `nightly-2026-09-03` — and the gate list
lives with I0b and I1, to be retired as they stabilise or are designed
around; it is down from fourteen to eleven. And a one-person framework
carries every gap itself, which is what Iris said she is willing to do.

"From scratch" therefore means iris, not a fourth thing. Masonry stays in
the plan as the **yardstick and the fallback**: building its demo and its
version of the transcript screen first says what a finished stack costs
on this hardware, proves android-view before iris depends on it, and
gives a comparison that is measured rather than remembered.

Not considered further: **GPUI** (Zed) mobile is a community fork that
depends on unpublished crates; **Dioxus/Blitz** is excluded by Iris (its
native renderer is Parley/Vello under HTML semantics, and the earlier
`tdep-survey/app-dioxus` spike parked it on a `vello_hybrid` stroke bug and
shipped the WebView); **Compose Multiplatform Desktop** would give a desktop
app for nothing but in Kotlin, which is the opposite direction.

### Weight and debug builds

Iris remembers the Linebender stack being slow in debug. What is behind
that is the dependency graph — Vello, wgpu, Parley, Fontique, Skrifa —
running unoptimised on the CPU side (path encoding, shaping), not the
widget layer. Xilem's own advice is only `split-debuginfo = "unpacked"` to
keep `target/` small; the fix everyone with this shape of dependency tree
uses is to optimise dependencies while leaving the app crate at `opt-level
= 0`:

    [profile.dev.package."*"]
    opt-level = 2

**Measured 2026-09-04, and it is not the widget layer.** iris's own
graph (wgpu + winit + cosmic-text at the time) built cold in **43s** with
a 2.1 GB `target/`, and **1m46s** with a 1.5 GB `target/` under the
profile above — so the knob costs build time and saves disk here, and
plain debug was never the problem. Masonry's graph is the one with Vello,
Parley, Fontique and Skrifa in it, and E1 gives the number that matters
for it: **`libmain.so` is 181 MB in debug and 11 MB in release.** That
size is also a correctness issue rather than only a weight one — a debug
build labels its Vulkan objects, and the emulator's driver segfaults in
`SetDebugUtilsObjectNameEXT` when it does. Runtime cost of the profile
knob is still unmeasured; resident memory and the frame cost of an
800-event page want E2. Vello proper needs compute shaders and carries a
large shader set; `vello_hybrid` is lighter and Masonry can now render
through either (or Vello CPU) via its `imaging` abstraction, so "keep it
light" has a knob inside the same stack.

## Recommendation

1. **Build `client-core` now, whatever the framework.** A Rust crate holding
   the event model (shared with `server/` as one crate, ending the
   `Events.kt` mirror), the API and SSE clients, the transcript fold, the
   cache, the markdown block model, the highlighter and the ANSI parser,
   with the existing JVM tests ported. It is the part of the app that is
   already tested, already logic, and already duplicated on the server.
2. **One foundation, two widget layers.** The platform plumbing is shared
   whichever way the decision goes: android-view for the Android surface,
   keyboard and accessibility bridge; `wgpu` for the GPU; AccessKit for
   names; winit on the desktop. On top of it, **Masonry as the yardstick**
   (E1, E2) and **iris as the thing being built** (I0–I5), both aimed at
   the same transcript screen with the same pass conditions.
3. **Decide when the transcript screen exists in both**, from the
   measurements, and record the decision here with the numbers. If iris
   carries the screen within the Compose baseline, it is the app's
   framework and Masonry was the calibration. If it does not, the
   measurement says which parts of Masonry to adopt underneath it.
4. Then the shell (E3), the desktop window (E4) and the packaging (E5),
   which do not depend on the choice.

## Experiments, in order

Each has a pass condition that is a measurement in this clone. The rig
matters: this emulator runs `-gpu host` with **host Vulkan switched off**
(`GPU_HOST_FEATURES` in `emulator-tools`, a gfxstream/Venus gap), so inside
the guest a `wgpu` app gets GLES, not Vulkan; the earlier Dioxus spike also
needed `WGPU_GLES_MINOR_VERSION=1` for compute shaders and found `wgpu`'s
Android backend wants API 26 (a libc symbol). The real phone has Vulkan.
Per the standing rule, a rig limit is something to fix before it is
accepted.

- [x] **E0 — toolchain (done 2026-09-04).** Installed under the
      user-owned SDK: **NDK r29 (`29.0.14206865`)**, 2.4 GB at
      `~/Android/Sdk/ndk/29.0.14206865`, the newest stable — r30 is still
      at rc.3. **cargo-ndk 4.1.2**. Verified by cross-compiling a scratch
      `cdylib` to both ABIs: `file` reports "for Android 26, built by NDK
      r29 (14206865)" for `aarch64-linux-android` and
      `x86_64-linux-android`. Two things to know at the call site.
      **cargo-ndk 4's API-level flag is `-P`, not `-p`** — `-p` is now
      passed through to cargo as `--package`, so the old
      `cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a -p 26` panics with `unknown package: 26`
      *and dumps the whole environment to stdout* as a bug report, which is
      worth not doing in a log somebody might paste. And the Android
      targets were installed for **stable** only; the pinned nightly needs
      its own, which `iris/rust-toolchain.toml` now declares.
- [x] **E1 — android-view's Masonry demo on this emulator (2026-09-04).**
      It builds, renders on the GPU through Vulkan, exposes its
      accessibility tree, and **the phone's own keyboard types into its
      editor** — but with **no autocorrect and no suggestions**. Ticked
      because everything it was meant to establish is established,
      including the one gap; that gap is now E2's problem and I2's.

      *Build.* `~/src/android-view` at `bec6c62`, x86_64 rather than the
      README's arm64 because that is what this emulator is:
      `cargo ndk -t x86_64 -P 26 -o masonry-app/src/main/jniLibs/ build -p
      android-view-masonry-demo --release`, then
      `./gradlew :masonry-app:assembleDebug`. **`libmain.so` is 181 MB in
      debug and 11 MB in release** — the loudest single number about
      Vello's dependency graph, and the reason the release build matters
      for more than speed.

      *Renderer.* wgpu takes **Vulkan**, and the emulator log confirms it
      from the other side: `Created VkDevice ... for application:'wgpu'`.
      Two things were needed. The emulator must be given Vulkan at all —
      `-feature Vulkan` with `VK_DRIVER_FILES` pointing at the SDK's
      `vk_swiftshader_icd.json`, **plus `-no-snapshot-load`**, which is the
      piece this file had flagged as untested: without a cold boot the
      guest keeps the snapshot's old GPU config and `cmd gpu vkjson`
      reports zero devices however the host is configured. And the native
      library must be **release**: a debug build calls
      `SetDebugUtilsObjectNameEXT` to label its image views, and the
      emulator's own guest driver (`vulkan.ranchu.so`) segfaults inside it.
      On GLES, with no Vulkan available, it instead fails
      `Surface::configure` with "Invalid surface" — untriaged, since the
      Vulkan path works and Vello wants compute shaders anyway.

      *Accessibility works*, which E2's condition 6 and every bench script
      depend on. `ui-trace` reads Masonry's AccessKit tree: "Add task"
      arrives as a named `Button`, the editor as an `EditText` node. So
      tap-by-name works against a Masonry screen for any control carrying
      a name; the demo's editor carries none, which is the demo's omission
      rather than the framework's.

      *The keyboard: real input yes, suggestions no.* Tapping the editor
      opens the actual soft keyboard (`mInputShown=true`, Gboard), and
      tapping its keys types into Masonry — "teh" typed key by key, with a
      caret. What does **not** appear is Gboard's suggestion strip. The
      control is what makes that a finding rather than an impression: the
      **same three key taps in the Settings app's search field, on the same
      device in the same session, produce "teh | the | yeh"**. So the strip
      works here and android-view's editor is not asking for it — most
      likely the `EditorInfo` its `InputConnection` reports. That matches
      Robrix's report that the Android keyboard is not yet "full", and it
      is the single most important thing to fix or fund upstream, because
      composition, autocorrect and suggestions are exactly what the
      composer in this app needs and exactly what `winit` cannot do at all.

      **Cause found 2026-09-04, and it is Masonry's, not android-view's.**
      `~/src/android-view/masonry/src/lib.rs:531` is

          fn as_input_connection(&mut self) -> Option<&mut dyn InputConnection> {
              // TODO
              None
          }

      so the Masonry demo has **no `InputConnection` at all**; `RustView`
      returns null from `onCreateInputConnection` and the IME falls back to
      dispatching raw key events, which is exactly the behaviour observed —
      keys arrive, composition does not exist, so there is nothing for
      Gboard to suggest against. It is not a wrong `EditorInfo`, and the
      guess above that it was is withdrawn.

      android-view's **own** demo (`demo/src/lib.rs`, packaged by `app/`)
      implements the whole trait against a parley editor and asks for
      `INPUT_TYPE_CLASS_TEXT | CAP_SENTENCES | AUTO_CORRECT | MULTI_LINE`
      with `IME_FLAG_NO_FULLSCREEN | NO_EXTRACT_UI | NO_ENTER_ACTION`
      (`demo/src/lib.rs:588`). So the capability is present in the layer
      iris would sit on, and the 30-odd method `InputConnection` trait in
      `src/ime.rs` — `set_composing_text`, `set_composing_region`,
      `finish_composing_text`, `text_before_cursor`, `cursor_caps_mode`,
      `request_cursor_updates`, and `InputMethodManager::update_selection`
      to push the selection back — is the full surface an IME needs.
      **This changes what I2 costs**: the IME bridge is a trait to
      implement over iris's parley editor, not a gap to fund upstream. It
      also means E2 inherits Masonry's TODO, so a Masonry transcript will
      have the same dead composer until somebody fills that in.

      **Measured on the emulator, same session, same device.** Built
      android-view's own demo — `cargo ndk -t x86_64 -P 26 -o
      app/src/main/jniLibs/ build -p android-view-demo --release`, then
      `./gradlew :app:assembleDebug`, installed with `ANDROID_SERIAL=$(emu
      serial)` — and tapped into its editor. `dumpsys input_method` reports
      `mInputShown=true` with `mServedView=…viewdemo.DemoView`, and the
      screenshot shows **Gboard's suggestion strip populated with "dolor |
      Dolores | door"**: the caret had landed inside the word *dolor* in
      the demo's lorem ipsum, and Gboard read that word out of the Rust
      editor through `text_before_cursor`. So on this emulator, through
      android-view, a parley editor gets a real IME with real suggestions
      drawn from its own buffer. That is the bar E1 could not reach and the
      bar I2 is written against, and it is now known to be reachable.

      *One crash seen once — reproduced and diagnosed 2026-09-04.* With an
      accessibility client attached the app aborted, stack:
      `android_view::view::do_frame` → `CallbackCtx::finish` →
      `accesskit_android::event::QueuedEvents::raise` →
      `send_completed_event` → `unwrap()` on `Err(JavaException)`.
      android-view builds `panic = "abort"`, so a JNI call that throws
      takes the process. Two later `ui-trace record` runs left the app
      alive, so the trigger looked narrower than "a client is attached".

      **It is the opposite of "a client is attached": it is a client
      having *detached*.** `accesskit_android`'s `State` enum
      (`adapter.rs:161` in 0.4.0, `:192` in 0.8.0) is
      `Inactive | Placeholder | Active`, and **nothing ever moves it back
      to `Inactive`**. A client — `ui-trace`, which is uiautomator — calls
      into the node provider once, `get_or_init_tree` promotes the adapter
      to `Active`, and it stays there for the life of the process. Every
      later change then returns `Some(QueuedEvents)`, `raise` calls
      `ViewParent.requestSendAccessibilityEvent`, and that reaches
      `AccessibilityManager.sendAccessibilityEvent`, which on the main
      looper **throws `IllegalStateException("Accessibility off. Did you
      forget to check that?")` when accessibility is disabled**. jni-rs
      returns `Err(JavaException)`, `send_completed_event` unwraps it, and
      `panic = "abort"` ends the process.

      *The controlled run*, one process (pid 4085), `settings get secure
      accessibility_enabled` = 0 throughout:

      - tapped the editor and typed three keys with `adb shell input tap`,
        no client ever attached — **alive**;
      - one `ui-trace record -d 800` with no gesture at all, then two
        seconds' wait — **still alive** (the queue was raised while the
        client was still there);
      - the very next three keystrokes, same process — **aborted**, same
        stack.

      So the failure is not the recording; it is the **first thing that
      changes the accessibility tree after a recording ends**. That makes
      it a standing hazard for this project rather than an oddity:
      `transcript-bench.sh`, `stream-bench.sh` and `bench-lib.sh`'s
      tap-by-name all attach and detach uiautomator, so on a Rust app the
      typing or scrolling *after* a bench run is what dies, several
      seconds away from anything that looks like a cause.

      **Still present at head**: 0.8.0 is the newest `accesskit_android`
      (the demo resolves 0.4.0) and both the unconditional `unwrap` in
      `send_completed_event` and the one-way `State` are unchanged there,
      so upgrading is not the fix. **Our mitigation for I2/I4 is a gate we
      own**: ask `AccessibilityManager.isEnabled()` before calling
      `raise`, and drop the events when it says no. Worth reporting
      upstream as well — the honest fix is for `raise` to clear a pending
      exception rather than unwrap it, since a view can be detached or
      accessibility switched off between queueing and raising no matter
      who is calling.

      *A rig trap that cost a wrong conclusion.* Several bounded runs were
      given `sleep N; emu down` watchdogs, and one armed for an earlier
      experiment fired in the middle of a later one — the app vanished, adb
      hung, and it read exactly like the Vulkan path crashing. It was not.
      A watchdog must be scoped to the process it guards (`kill $pid`, with
      the pid captured at launch) rather than to whatever AVD is running
      when it wakes, and only one should be armed at a time.

- [ ] **E2 — a transcript in Masonry.** One screen: open a sandbox session,
      page 800 events into `VirtualScroll` bottom-anchored, draw markdown
      from `pulldown-cmark` into Parley rich text with links and code
      chips, select across two rows with the platform handles, expand a
      tool row holding its top edge. Pass: the render numbers land within
      the Compose baseline in `transcript-bench.sh` on the GPU emulator
      (same gestures, same session), and every one of the seven behaviours
      above is either shown or has a written reason it cannot be.
- [ ] **E3 — the shell.** Kotlin `MainActivity` + `NotificationService`
      + Keystore + share intent calling into Rust over JNI, with the SSE
      follow loop in Rust. Pass: a notification arrives with the app
      closed, and a share lands in a session.
- [ ] **E4 — the same screen on the desktop** in a winit window, from the
      same crate, with only the layout differing.
- [ ] **E5 — the packaging xtask**: `cargo ndk` → `javac`/`d8` → `aapt2`
      → `zipalign` → `apksigner`, signed with the existing release key,
      installed through Dev Updater. Pass: the APK installs over the
      Gradle-built one and the notification service starts.

### The iris track

These build iris up to carry the app. Each is a feature added to iris
with a pass condition, in dependency order. Work in `iris/` in this
repository on the `rustify` branch, and record in this file what each
step measured.

- [x] **I0a — where iris lives (decided 2026-09-04).** For now it is
      **vendored at `iris/` in this repository**, history not carried,
      and consumed by path. Iris's decision: keep it close while it is
      being reshaped for this app, and give it back its own repository —
      `iris/iris` on the gitea remote, which already holds the full
      244-commit history, on a branch of its own — once it has proved
      itself. The vendored tree is that repository's `main` at
      `7b54aaf` ("readme", 2026-01-29), byte-identical to the public
      GitHub copy, so a later reconciliation has a known base. A crate
      that uses it says `iris = { path = "../iris" }`.
- [x] **I0b — make it build here (done 2026-09-04).** iris now builds,
      clippy-clean and rustfmt-clean at the defaults, on a pinned dated
      nightly, and the `tabs` example draws on this VM's GPU.

      **The pin** is `nightly-2026-09-03` (rustc 1.100.0-nightly,
      `2e2b193f8`), declared in `iris/rust-toolchain.toml` along with the
      `clippy`/`rustfmt` components and the two Android targets, so a
      fresh clone provisions itself. It is dated rather than `nightly`
      because the whole failure below was a rolling channel moving under
      an unattended build. Installed with `--profile minimal`: 912 MB.

      **The 36 errors were one syntax change, and the earlier diagnosis in
      this file was wrong.** It is not that a trait must now be declared
      `const trait` — the vendored tree already declares them that way,
      which is how it was written in January. What changed is the *impl*
      keyword order: `impl const Trait for T` is now
      `const impl Trait for T`, and generics go on the `impl`
      (`const impl<T: [const] Foo> Bar for T`). Bounds are unaffected;
      `T: const Foo`, `T: [const] Foo` and `impl const Foo` in argument
      position all still compile. Everything else — the unresolved
      `UiVec2`/`Vec2`/`impl_op` imports, and a `Color<u8>` that resolved
      to `wgpu_types::Color` — cascaded from the seven files that failed
      to parse. The rewrite was mechanical across 20 sites and took the
      workspace from 36 errors to 0.

      **`#![feature]` gates, 12 after this step** (two were declared and
      unused, and were removed: `map_try_insert`, `const_cmp`).
      Load-bearing and worth watching: `const_trait_impl`, `const_ops`,
      `const_convert`, `const_destruct` are the const-traits family and
      the one that has already broken once — they move together, so
      advancing the pin means re-reading this section. `unboxed_closures`
      + `fn_traits` (postfix builder API) and `unsize` +
      `coerce_unsized` (widget handles) are pairs. The rest are
      individually small: `macro_metavar_expr_concat`, `portable_simd`,
      `associated_type_defaults`, `option_into_flat_iter`, and `gen_blocks`
      in the top crate.

      **Running it headless.** `iris/run-headless.sh EXAMPLE [--shot PNG]`
      with `iris/headless.conf`, the same trick `emu` uses: a headless
      sway, and `grim` for the picture. It deliberately starts its *own*
      compositor rather than joining `emu`'s — sway tiles, so adding a
      window to the one an emulator sits in resizes that emulator.
      Unlike `emu`'s it disables Xwayland, since winit speaks Wayland.
      **This VM has a real GPU for this**: Vulkan 1.4 through Venus onto
      the host's RX 7900 XT, and GL 4.6 through virgl — so desktop wgpu
      work here is not software-rasterised, unlike inside the emulator.

      **iris has no tests at all** (`cargo test --workspace`: 0 passed
      across 6 targets). Nothing to keep passing, and nothing to catch a
      regression — worth knowing before I1 changes the text stack.

      **`iris-core` no longer depends on winit, and now cross-compiles to
      Android.** It wanted exactly one thing from it — `PhysicalSize<u32>`
      in `UiRenderNode::resize`'s signature, for two numbers it immediately
      turned into floats — and that pulled a whole windowing backend into
      the layer below it, the wrong direction. `resize` takes
      `impl Into<Vec2>` now, like `UiRenderState::resize` beside it already
      did. The consequence is the point: with winit in the graph an Android
      build of the core failed in `android-activity` (which needs a backend
      feature nothing here selects), and without it
      `cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a -P 26 build -p iris-core` finishes in 30s and
      produces an rlib, wgpu's Android backend included. So **iris's
      widget, layout and render core already builds for the phone**, and
      what I2 has to supply is the surface, the input and the IME — not a
      port of the library.

      **Build weight, cold, on this VM's 8 cores** (`rm -rf target`, then
      `cargo build --example tabs`), since "the Linebender stack is slow in
      debug" was the worry behind this question: plain debug **43s** and a
      2.1 GB `target/`; with the `[profile.dev.package."*"] opt-level = 2`
      knob, **1m46s** and 1.5 GB. So iris's own wgpu + winit + cosmic-text
      graph is not the slow thing — which makes it a calibration for E1
      rather than an answer about Masonry, whose graph adds Vello, Parley,
      Fontique and Skrifa. Runtime cost of the knob was not measured here.

      **Fixed: iris never called `pre_present_notify`.** The symptom was
      that about one start in five kept the window's 800x600 startup layout
      on a 1920x1200 surface for good. What settled it was tracing iris's
      own decisions into memory and dumping them from another thread —
      `eprintln!` in the draw path makes the defect vanish, which is why
      earlier attempts kept losing it. The traces from a good and a bad run
      are **byte-identical**: both lay out and draw `redraw_all at
      (1920, 1200)` into a 1920x1200 texture with `suboptimal=false`. iris
      was drawing the right frame every time; the compositor was still
      showing the first one, and forcing a full repaint did not shift it.
      What was missing is winit's `Window::pre_present_notify`, called
      immediately before `present`, which on Wayland is what ties the
      commit to the surface's frame callback. Without it a frame drawn with
      nothing following it can sit unpresented with nothing left to flush
      it — which is exactly a window that has just settled after its
      opening resize. Measured: **0 bad in 40** with the fix, against 4 in
      20 before it, and — the stronger evidence — 0 in 20 in the
      instrumented configuration that had been 15 in 20. Runtime resizing
      still round-trips to a byte-identical layout.

      Two things ruled out on the way, both worth not re-trying: the
      present mode (the fault survived the move from `AutoNoVsync` to
      `AutoVsync` at the same rate) and the size cache (`redraw_all` clears
      it). A `desired_maximum_frame_latency` of 1 moved the rate without
      fixing it, and was reverted. Iris's own note that she had never seen
      the library fail to resize was the useful steer: it pointed away from
      the layout code, where two hours had already gone.

      One thing was fixed on the way, and it is not that bug: `update`
      redrew everything when `resized` was set, but `needs_redraw` — which
      is what decides whether to *ask* for a frame — did not know about
      `resized` at all. The two now share one `needs_redraw_all`, since a
      condition in one and not the other is a frame nobody requests. It is
      latent on Wayland only because winit asks for a redraw after a resize
      by itself; on Android, where the surface work of I2 will not have
      winit underneath it, nothing else here would have asked.
- [x] **I1 — parley, and a glyph atlas (done 2026-09-04).** No bake-off:
      Iris decided for parley directly ("I wanted to switch it to parley
      anyways"), and then asked for the atlas as well ("just do the atlas,
      commit to it, we do want it"). Both are in.

      **What parley bought, beyond shaping.** Its editing model addresses
      text by byte offset into one string, where cosmic-text used
      `(line, index)` — so `select_content`, `delete_between`,
      `insert_inner` and `newline` collapse into ordinary string
      operations. Bigger: `Selection::geometry` and `Cursor::geometry`
      replace `iter_layout_lines`, `index_x` and `cursor_pos`, which walked
      runs by hand to place the caret and the selection boxes and were not
      bidi- or wrap-correct. `edit.rs` lost about 130 lines and gained
      Home/End. Its cursor motions map onto parley's `next_visual`,
      `previous_visual_word`, `next_line` and so on, in one function.

      **The atlas is what "text resizing (per frame) is really slow"
      was.** Every string used to be rasterised into its own `RgbaImage`
      and uploaded as a whole texture whenever anything about it changed,
      so a window resize re-rasterised and re-uploaded every visible
      string. Now a glyph is rasterised once per font, size and subpixel
      phase, shared by every string that contains it, and a resize
      re-emits quads without touching the GPU's copy. **The tabs example
      reports it: `views`, the number of texture views bound, went from 6
      to 1** — six per-string textures became one shared page. Supporting
      pieces: a `GLYPH` primitive that samples a sub-rectangle and tints
      it (the existing texture primitive samples a whole texture), a
      `Patch` texture update so a new glyph costs its own bytes rather
      than a 4 MB page, and `GpuTextures` keeping its `Texture`s, since a
      view cannot be written through.

      **Not yet measured**, and the honest gap in this step: the TODO's
      "really slow" was never given a number, so neither is the
      improvement. What is evidence rather than argument is the view count
      and the shape of the work — a resize no longer rasterises. A
      before/after timing wants the transcript screen of I5 to be worth
      taking.

      **Two bugs found on the way**, both pre-existing: `primitives!`'s
      `@count` rule recursed comma-separated while matching
      space-separated, so it terminated only for exactly two primitives
      and adding a third hit the recursion limit; and `Color` had no
      `Default`, which parley's `Brush` requires.

      **Fourteen tests**, iris's first. The editor is the one part that is
      pure logic rather than something needing a GPU and a window, and it
      was rewritten wholesale with no way to exercise it — synthetic input
      does not reach a client under the headless compositor, which has no
      seat devices. Two of the tests are aimed at what the rewrite could
      plausibly have broken: the IME preedit path, and editing multi-byte
      text now that offsets are bytes.

      Dropping cosmic-text and unicode-segmentation also retired two
      nightly gates — `portable_simd` (the old glyph compositing) and
      `gen_blocks` (the deleted line iterator). **Eleven left.**

### iris's binding array does not survive real Android hardware (found 2026-09-04)

Iris asked, of the "unknown number of images" case — a transcript with an
unbounded number of attached screenshots — whether iris's approach even
works on a phone, since her recollection was that mobile does not support
it. Checked rather than assumed, and the recollection is right, with
sources rather than a guess.

**What iris does today.** Every texture — every `Image` widget
(`src/widget/image.rs`) and every glyph atlas page — gets its own
permanent slot in one array via `Textures::add`
(`core/src/primitive/texture.rs:65`), and both the `TEXTURE` and `GLYPH`
primitives sample it by `view_idx` into `binding_array<texture_2d<f32>>`
at `core/src/render/shader.wgsl:56`, sized by `UiLimits::default` — 100,000
textures, 1,000 samplers (`core/src/render/mod.rs:347`). That needs three
wgpu features: `TEXTURE_BINDING_ARRAY`,
`SAMPLED_TEXTURE_AND_STORAGE_BUFFER_ARRAY_NON_UNIFORM_INDEXING`,
`PARTIALLY_BOUND_BINDING_ARRAY` — Vulkan's `VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing`
("bindless"), promoted to core in 1.2. So a transcript with an unbounded
number of images is exactly the case that grows this array without bound,
one permanent slot per image.

**Measured first on the emulator, and it fails outright.** A rig
(`rigs/gpu-probe`, a plain executable with no window, pushed with `adb
push` and run from `/data/local/tmp` — no APK needed to ask a device what
it supports) asks `wgpu::Adapter::request_device` for exactly iris's
features and limits. Against the emulator's guest Vulkan — both
SwiftShader (`vk_swiftshader_icd.json`) and lavapipe (`lvp_icd.json`,
cold-booted) — `request_device` **fails**: `Unsupported features were
requested: TEXTURE_BINDING_ARRAY |
SAMPLED_TEXTURE_AND_STORAGE_BUFFER_ARRAY_NON_UNIFORM_INDEXING |
PARTIALLY_BOUND_BINDING_ARRAY`. A second, raw query through `ash`
(`rigs/gpu-probe/src/vk.rs`, bypassing wgpu) shows lavapipe's
`vkGetPhysicalDeviceFeatures2` actually reporting all seven descriptor-
indexing sub-features as `true` at device api version 1.3 — so on this
software renderer wgpu-hal's own feature detection is being more
conservative than the driver, for a reason not chased further (a likely
instance-version negotiation gap, since `VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing` was
only promoted to core at 1.2 and wgpu-hal's own `Instance::init` may be
requesting less). That part is an emulator/wgpu-hal question and not the
finding that matters.

**The finding that matters is about real phones, not the emulator, and it
is sourced rather than recalled.** The **Android Vulkan Profile 2025** —
Google and Khronos's current baseline, covering **80.1% of active
Vulkan-capable Android devices** as of October 2025
([developer.android.com/ndk/guides/graphics/android-vulkan-profile](https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/graphics/android-vulkan-profile))
— does **not** require `VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing` or any descriptor-
indexing feature. It requires `shaderSampledImageArrayDynamicIndexing`
(indexing an array of samplers by a value uniform across the invocation —
Vulkan 1.0 baseline, unrelated to bindless) and stops there; the same is
true of the 2021 and 2022 profiles. On the hardware side, Arm's own
developer documentation states **"`VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing` is
supported on all Valhall and 5th Gen GPUs"**
([developer.arm.com/mobile-graphics-and-gaming/vulkan-api-best-practices-on-arm-gpus](https://developer.arm.com/mobile-graphics-and-gaming/vulkan-api-best-practices-on-arm-gpus)) —
Mali generations from roughly 2019 (Mali-G77) onward, named affirmatively
with no claim made for Bifrost, Midgard or Utgard, which are still common
in budget and older Android phones still in use. So this is not a
software-renderer artifact: a real, currently-shipping share of the
Android fleet lacks the feature iris's texture pipeline asks for
unconditionally, and the newest official baseline does not promise it
either. (A crates.io/search-engine claim of "1% support on Android" for
this extension was checked against its cited source, an Arm blog post,
and was not actually there — that number does not appear anywhere primary
and should not be repeated; the 80.1%-baseline-excludes-it finding above
is the one with an attributable source.)

**Recommendation, not yet implemented.** iris already solved the
identical problem for text in I1: the glyph atlas
(`core/src/render/atlas.rs`) packs many small rasters into a handful of
shared 1024×1024 pages and samples them by UV offset, so **text needs
none of the three features above** — only ordinary single-texture
sampling. The same technique generalizes to images: route an `Image`
widget through a shared atlas when it is small enough to pack (thumbnails,
downscaled attachment previews, avatars, icons), and fall back to one
ordinary, non-array texture bind group — selected per batched draw call
the way every immediate-mode 2D renderer already does — for anything too
large to atlas well (a photo opened at full resolution). Either path is
plain Vulkan 1.0 / GLES texture sampling, so it removes the descriptor-
indexing requirement from iris's device request entirely, which is also
what would make the emulator work regardless of the wgpu-hal question
above: a device that never asks for the feature cannot be refused for
lacking it. This is a change to iris's rendering core — the shader's
binding group layout, `Textures`, the texture and glyph primitives, and
`ui/painter.rs` — so it is written here as a recommendation rather than
started, per the project's rule to confirm a load-bearing design change
before making it. **It should be resolved before I2 is called done**,
since I2's pass condition is the phone, not just the emulator, and this
is exactly the kind of thing that passes on a desktop GPU and fails
silently on real hardware.

- [ ] **I2 — iris on android-view.** An `android-view` surface as a second
      backend beside winit: `wgpu` on the view's surface (GLES here, see
      the Vulkan section; Vulkan on the phone), touch as pointer events,
      window insets and the keyboard inset as layout inputs, the back
      gesture as an event, the IME bridge feeding the editor from I1.
      Pass: the `tabs` example and a text field run on the emulator, and
      the phone's own keyboard types into the field with autocorrect and
      suggestions — the same bar as E1.
- [ ] **I3 — a virtualised, bottom-anchored list.** Variable-height rows,
      keyed, composed only while visible, paged in both directions with a
      "more" sentinel at each end, a scroll anchor that survives rows
      being inserted above, and "hold the edge nearest the tap" done in
      the layout pass. Pass: 800 rows of real transcript text from the
      sandbox scroll without a frame over the Compose baseline in
      `transcript-bench.sh`, measured on the GPU emulator.
- [ ] **I4 — accessibility names via AccessKit.** Every control carries a
      name; `ui-trace` can find and tap it by label. Pass: `bench-lib.sh`'s
      tap-by-name works against the iris screen unchanged.
- [ ] **I5 — the transcript screen in iris.** E2's pass conditions, all
      seven behaviours, against the sandbox with `--delay`. This is the
      point the decision in the recommendation is made at.

## For the next agent

What to do when you pick this up, in order, so nothing here has to be
re-derived:

1. Read this file, then `AGENTS.md` and `PLAN.md`. The rules there
   (measure, do not read; fix the rig before accepting its limits; the
   emulator is this checkout's own) all apply.
2. Work on the **`rustify`** branch of this clone (`ai-app-2`), not on
   `main` and not in `ai-app`. Nothing on this branch is production until
   Iris says so. Commit and push as you go.
3. Take the next unchecked box above, in order. E1 has proved android-view
   on this emulator, so the E-steps and the I-steps can now proceed in
   parallel in separate sessions; see "Where things stand" at the top for
   which is next.
4. Every step ends with its measurement written into this file beside the
   box, and the box ticked or the reason it could not be written in its
   place. A step that is blocked says by what, not "later". Write it as you
   go rather than at the end — see "Keep this file current as you work".
5. Run the existing rigs rather than inventing new ones: `ui-sandbox.sh`
   for a server with fixtures, `transcript-bench.sh` for the scroll
   baseline, `ui-trace` for anything positional, `emu up` for the
   emulator, `iris/run-headless.sh EXAMPLE --shot PNG` for an iris
   example on this displayless machine, and `rigs/gpu-probe` to ask a
   device (this VM, the emulator, or a real phone over `adb push`) what
   `wgpu` features and limits it actually has before building anything on
   the assumption it does. The Vulkan section below says how to get a
   Vulkan path in the emulator when a `wgpu` backend needs one.
6. **Bound anything heavy at the moment you start it.** An emulator or a
   long build gets a deadline — `timeout`, or a watchdog scoped to the pid
   you just started — rather than a plan to stop it later. Scope it to
   that pid: a watchdog written as `sleep N; emu down` fired into a later
   experiment here and made a working Vulkan build look like a crash. And
   stop the emulator when the work needing it is done rather than between
   tasks.
7. Decisions belong here with a date and what was rejected, the way
   `PLAN.md` does it. Do not put design into commit messages alone.

### Vulkan in the emulator (measured 2026-09-04)

**Settled 2026-09-04: the guest gets Vulkan from SwiftShader, and the
missing step was a cold boot.** `-feature Vulkan` plus
`VK_DRIVER_FILES=$HOME/Android/Sdk/emulator/lib64/vulkan/vk_swiftshader_icd.json`
gets the *host* side to select SwiftShader, but the guest keeps reporting
zero devices until `-no-snapshot-load` is added, because it boots from a
snapshot saved under the previous GPU config — `-no-snapshot-save` is
worth adding too, so the Vulkan-configured snapshot does not then break
the next ordinary boot. With that, `cmd gpu vkjson` reports SwiftShader
Subzero and wgpu takes its Vulkan path (E1). `EMU_GPU=software` in
`emulator-tools` gets the same guest Vulkan with no GPU use at all, for
work where the emulator's frame rate is not what is being measured.

The rest of this section stands as the record of why host Vulkan is not
available. A `wgpu` app in this emulator was going to get GLES only,
because host Vulkan is switched off in `emulator-tools`. Retried on Mesa
26.1.7: **Venus still fails the same way** — gfxstream picks
`externalMemoryMode: OpaqueFd`, probes `VK_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM` for an
exportable colour buffer, and Venus says the format is unsupported
(`Failed to find memory type for ColorBuffers`, fatal before adb sees the
device). Venus does advertise `VK_KHR_external_memory_fd` and
`VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf`, so the gap is specifically opaque-fd
image export. gfxstream has a string-valued `VulkanExternalMemoryMode`
setting ("overrides what would otherwise be determined automatically"),
but `-feature Name=Value` is rejected as a bad feature name, and the only
mode words compiled into this emulator's `libgfxstream_backend.so`
(37.1.11) are `OpaqueFd`, `Metal` and `none` — there is no dma-buf mode
in this build to switch to. So Venus is blocked by the emulator, not by
Mesa; retry when the emulator package updates, since upstream gfxstream
does have dma-buf external memory.

What **does** work: pointing the emulator's Vulkan loader at the software
ICDs the emulator ships itself, with the feature enabled:

    VK_DRIVER_FILES=$HOME/Android/Sdk/emulator/lib64/vulkan/vk_swiftshader_icd.json \
    GPU_HOST_FEATURES="-feature Vulkan" emu up

The guest then reports Vulkan 1.3 (`cmd gpu vkjson`, SwiftShader
Subzero) while GLES still runs on the real GPU through virgl — so a
Vello/wgpu app can take its real Vulkan path here, with compute shaders,
CPU-rasterised. That is enough to test *correctness* of the Vulkan path
in the emulator; GPU *performance* of it is a phone measurement either
way, exactly as `MACHINE.md` already says about frame times. **lavapipe**
(`lvp_icd.json`, the other ICD the emulator ships) selected llvmpipe and
booted, then the emulator died right after loading the `default_boot`
snapshot with nothing in the log; a snapshot saved under a different
Vulkan device is the suspect, and `-no-snapshot-load` is the untested
next step. SwiftShader is the one that works today.
`EMU_GPU=software` is now in `emulator-tools` (agreed with the ai-app
session and with Iris, default unchanged, since `-gpu host` was measured
and the Compose scroll benchmarks depend on it). The cold-boot flags are
not a knob there: that wants snapshot invalidation as well, which is a
bigger design question in shared tooling.

## Things a Rust app changes elsewhere

- **`wg-app-link`'s `:link`** (pinned TLS, enrollment store, QR activity)
  is Kotlin shared with Dev Updater. The certificate code already exists on
  the Rust side of the submodule; the pinned-CA build step
  (`generatePinnedCert`) becomes a `build.rs` reading the same path. The QR
  scanner stays a Kotlin activity, since the camera is a platform feature.
- **Tooling** becomes `cargo` for everything but packaging: `cargo test`,
  `clippy`, `fmt` cover the whole client, which is the motivation. Gradle
  remains for the APK, signing (`~/.config/ai-app/release.jks`) and Dev
  Updater's build modes; `build-apk.sh` would call `cargo ndk` first.
- **The bench scripts** (`ui-trace` by accessibility label) keep working
  only if the framework exposes names through AccessKit on Android; that is
  part of E2's pass condition, not a nicety.
- **Icons** stay Nerd Font glyphs from the committed subset; Parley/Fontique
  loads a font file directly, so `build-icon-font.sh` is unchanged.

## Sources

- iced: [repo](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced), [0.14 release](https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/releases/tag/0.14.0), [Android thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46350641), [markdown selection request](https://discourse.iced.rs/t/markdown-widgets-text-should-be-selectable/1107)
- Linebender: [2026 Q1 report](https://linebender.org/blog/tmil-25/), [xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem), [parley](https://github.com/linebender/parley), [vello](https://github.com/linebender/vello), [vello_hybrid](https://docs.rs/vello_hybrid/latest/vello_hybrid/)
- android-view: [repo](https://github.com/rust-mobile/android-view); android-activity [PR #214](https://github.com/rust-mobile/android-activity/pull/214)
- winit Android IME: [#1823](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/1823), [#2766](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/2766), [#2305](https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit/issues/2305)
- egui on Android: [discussion #2053](https://github.com/emilk/egui/discussions/2053)
- Slint: [Android guide](https://docs.slint.dev/latest/docs/slint/guide/platforms/mobile/android/), [1.15 release](https://slint.dev/blog/slint-1.15-released), [licensing](https://slint.dev/faqs), rich text [#1325](https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/1325), markdown [#6684](https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/6684)
- Makepad: [repo](https://github.com/makepad/makepad), [makepad-widgets](https://docs.rs/makepad-widgets), [Robrix](https://github.com/project-robius/robrix), [Robrix releases](https://github.com/project-robius/robrix/releases)
- AccessKit: [releases](https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit/releases)
- Build tools: [cargo-ndk](https://github.com/bbqsrc/cargo-ndk), [cargo-apk](https://github.com/rust-mobile/cargo-apk), [rust-mobile](https://github.com/rust-mobile)
- uniffi: [repo](https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs), [KMP bindings fork](https://github.com/UbiqueInnovation/uniffi-kotlin-multiplatform-bindings)
- GPUI mobile: [gpui-mobile](https://github.com/itsbalamurali/gpui-mobile)
- The earlier Dioxus spike's findings on `wgpu`/Vulkan in this emulator: `~/repos/tdep-survey/app-dioxus/README.md`