By If you don’t remember BlueStacks, it’s the Windows application that makes it possible to use Android apps and play Android games on Windows-based PCs. The team made some pretty nice strides in app emulation and their hard work was rewarded with a great milestone achieved recently. The team has announced that the player has hit 5 million organic installs through its website in just 8 months — that’s no small feat for what initially appeared to be a niche type of product.
There’s nothing niche about some of the deals the company has inked, though, including partnerships with ASUS and AMD that will see BlueStacks technology pre-installed on 100 million devices being shipped next year. Well, some even more interesting developments could be taking place soon — your Windows RT devices could soon be running BlueStacks!
That’s right — ARM-based Windows 8 tablets might get access to nearly 750,000 Android apps currently swirling about the Google Play Store. This is only a rumor for now, but there is strong evidence that BlueStacks could be looking to go this route. BlueStacks’ Deepak Sharma actually acknowledged that the team was considering offering BlueStacks for Windows RT at some point next year. This isn’t a concrete commitment, but you have to think that they’re at least working on it.
For Microsoft there’s a bit of a double-edged sword to be clutched with this situation. On one hand, they’d have an enormous amount of mobile apps to offer on its Windows RT tablets, and since BlueStacks is already optimized to run on X86/64 versions of Windows it’d be nearly immediately available for those who decide they want to get a Surface Pro tablet.
On the other hand, Microsoft would be sacrificing interest in developing for its Metro UI. Why design two apps for two different operating systems when you can design one app for the most popular and port it over to the other? I can only imagine the look on Steve Ballmer’s face if Android apps were to become more prominent on Windows than Windows apps.
Still, this is something that any consumer should want and we’d be highly excited to see something of the sort announced at the upcoming CES conference, but nothing’s being confirmed at this point so we’ll just have to cross our fingers and see. To see what all the hooplah about BlueStacks is be sure to visit their site and download it for Windows or Mac.
Bluestacks is interesting but it’s frustrating. I got it to play a single card game on my PC. First, there’s no way to connect one to the other. In other words, play stats on the PC will stay on the PC. I’d like an option to actually run the app from my phone remotely essentially.
Second, it installed virtually everything on my phone BUT this one card game. No matter what I did it wouldn’t install that app. Worse, it takes forever to install the apps so you don’t know for sure if it’ll work this time for a LONG time.
First 5 million installs are always the toughest. Going from 5 million to 105 million is easy.
Nice way of looking at it.
Been running BlueStacks since beta – first under Win7 and now 8 Pro – really fun on a touch screen. Works just like it says & price is right.
When I’ve had a Q, their support was quick to respond.
I highly recommend BS – especially for a tablet & those of us with “older eyes” and/or “fatter fingers” – larger screen is great for games.
When your choices are as poor as they are looking, one could argue that almost any app COULD be coming to Win CE, errr…RT.