Mostly Chinese companies have been very busy designing & manufacturing actual silicon. And prices for such products have come down a lot, too.
It wouldn't surprise me if at some point there's RISC-V based phones, tablets & other devices on Chinese market, that most people outside China simply don't know about.
Or that teardown of a cheap phone sold in say, India, turns out to have a RISC-V SoC inside without much public attention beforehand.
Probably sooner than later. RISC-V is bound to become a lowest common denominator for computing devices especially at the low end. Picked by default unless <insert specific requirement here>.
Android being ported is a logical consequence of this.
It's gonna be cheap risc-v Chinese phones for a while. And they'll get faster and faster every six months. But they'll stay cheap. Until even Samsung can't compete and stops making phones, like LG did.
A couple of weeks ago SiFive announced a new core, the P870, which is in ARM Cortex-X3 class. That's the biggest core in the latest Snapdragon Gen 8 chips.
It typically takes 2-3 years from core announcement to being in an SoC for a high end phone.
They are coming.
Arm will have something newer by then, of course, but a 2023 flagship Galaxy S23 is not going to look stupid in 2026.
Every hardware company makes some plans that far ahead because the pipeline is so long. Details of course change a lot up to about 18-24 months before release but general direction must be known way earlier.
> Also, does this require across the stack changes? i.e. not just OS ones.
I'm not sure where you draw the boundary between 'stack' and 'os'. Can you expand a bit?