Earlier this month, Qualcomm announced it was working with Google on a RISC-V Wear OS chip. The Android team today provided an update on RISC-V adoption, including an initial timeline and emulator support.

Google says it has “begun to mature support for RISC-V in Android” with a particular focus on ensuring that “any CPU running RISC-V will have all of the features we expect to achieve high performance.”

At the moment, developers can “build, test, and run the Android support for RISC-V on your own machine” using Cuttlefish Virtual Device support. You can specifically build and run a basic Android Open Source Project (AOSP) experience that is “not yet fully optimized” but at a stage that Google believes is “ready to allow experimentation and collaboration.”

In terms of ensuring app compatibility, Google plans to “have the NDK ABI finalized and canary builds available on Android’s public CI soon and RISC-V on x86-64 & ARM64 available for easier testing” later this year.

The bigger Android milestone is publicly available RISC-V emulators in 2024 “with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors.” Google reiterates that wearables are expected to be the first form factor available. 

In terms of contributing, Google points to the following resources:

“https://github.com/google/android-riscv64 for detailed information on how to build and test the RISC-V support in Android, list of known issues and opportunities to contribute to AOSP at source.android.com and toolchain projects and support libraries.”

“Subscribe to RISC-V Android SIG mailing list or join directly, if your organization is a member of RISC-V International to stay tuned in to progress and offer your suggestions and feedback.”

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