It’s unclear what kind of effect this will have on RISC-V’s integration into the Android ecosystem. There are no RISC-V smartphones out there yet, so it won’t make life hard for phone makers, but it’s hard to see GKI support being axed as conducive for the adoption of the open source CPU arch. Android still accepts RISC-V patches via AOSP.

Google assures, however, that the end of RISC-V’s GKI support isn’t a death sentence for RISC-V on Android. “Android will continue to support RISC-V,” the ad biz said in a statement to Android Authority. “Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors.”

Looks like only specifically the generic kernel image was dropped, RISC-V as a target will still work. I’m not sure why Google even accepted RISC-V GKI code when there’s no real device or even SoC worth running Android on for the next couple of years, it’s all purely theoretical at this point.