Google has said that it wants to give RISC-V CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Now it has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. 

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work.

The search engine maker already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. This is the same as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware.

Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without using an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimised.

Next Google will want to get its Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" T

Once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will be useful for testing.