At the RISC-V sub-forum of the World Embedded Systems Conference on June 13, Mr. Wu Wei, Manager of RISC-V Prosperity 2036, revealed for the first time the initiative’s forecast for RISC-V market penetration over the next decade. Among the projections, the market share in mobile computing will rise from 0% to over 40% — a sign that Android (AOSP) RISC-V is expected to enter its first product boom period within two years.

Since 2022, Google has established a solid cooperative foundation with the RISC-V International Foundation. In 2023, it jointly founded the RISE Foundation with companies like Qualcomm to accelerate support for RISC-V in open-source software ecosystems, including AOSP. However, due to the massive scale of AOSP software and RISC-V’s current status as a latecomer in the mobile market, Google’s sole investment in RISC-V may struggle to keep up with the rapid iteration pace of RISC-V innovators and entrepreneurs.

A few months ago, a kernel team at Google temporarily removed RISC-V support due to product iteration pressure, only to revert the removal patch three weeks later and reinstate RISC-V architecture support. A Google spokesperson promptly issued a statement, affirming that Android will continue to support RISC-V and clarifying that its long-term commitment to RISC-V remains unchanged. This statement alleviated market concerns about Android abandoning RISC-V, but it also revealed that significant R&D and engineering work remains before Android fully supports RISC-V. Even if Google reinstates RISC-V support in the kernel, time and effort will be needed to ensure seamless integration with various RISC-V devices. This means that if we only wait for updates from AOSP upstream, we may need more than three years — longer than initially expected — to see commercial Android devices equipped with RISC-V chips hit the market. RISC-V Prosperity 2036, however, aims to shorten this expected timeline from “over 3 years” to “within 1 year”.

Kubuds Technology will closely monitor the progress of Android’s RISC-V support and collaborate closely with RISC-V manufacturers to help partners accelerate product R&D iterations and shorten the time-to-market cycle. Kubuds’ engineering team has extensive experience in Linux kernels, operating system distributions, AOSP system frameworks, emulators, and debugger tools. Over the past five years, the team has also supported multiple initiatives in the AOSP RISC-V open-source porting project. Additionally, as a member of RISC-V Prosperity 2036, Kubuds Technology will continue to drive the development of the RISC-V ecosystem and facilitate the widespread commercial application of RISC-V.