That’s perhaps one of the biggest headaches for RISC-V and the architecture as a whole: software compatibility. While both Arm and the x86 ecosystems are extensively supported, the same can’t be said for RISC-V.

I think the future will be that software comes to the end-user device nearly-compiled (think WebAssembly modules) and then is transformed into the final machine code on-device. This way ensures maximum hardware compatibility while retaining portability.

In that case, it doesn’t matter so much what hardware you’re sporting, as long as it supports the basic instructions.