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BlueStacks Allows You to Run Android Apps on a Mac

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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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BlueStacks announced a public alpha version of their Android App Player for the Mac today at Google I/O.

The company had originally released a beta version of their App Player for Windows back in March. The software allows users to run Android apps directly on their Windows PCs, and the newest version begins to extend that functionality to the Mac.




While the Windows version allows you to run any Android app without modification, the early Mac version seems to be limited to 15 initial apps that comes bundled with the download. The bundled apps include Air Control Lite, Alchemy, Basketball Shot, Drag Racing, Elastic World, Facebook, Glow Hockey, Guns'n'Glory, Paper Toss, Pulse, Robo Defense, Seesmic, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Zebra Paint.

Their support page claims that "in the very near future", they plan on opening the Mac version up to over 400,000 Android apps:
The BlueStacks App Player for Mac OSX (alpha) supports both Lion and Snow Leopard. You can test drive a fixed set of curated apps for the first release (alpha-1). In the very near future, BlueStacks will let you select from over 400,000 Android apps to play on your Mac.
Click to expand...
The alpha version is available as a free download from the BlueStacks website.

Article Link: BlueStacks Allows You to Run Android Apps on a Mac
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/28/bluestacks-allows-you-to-run-android-apps-on-a-mac/
I don't really get this. Why would you want to run Android apps on a Mac? Doesn't Mac already have a much better selection of quality apps than Android?
 
devinher said:
I don't really get this. Why would you want to run Android apps on a Mac? Doesn't Mac already have a much better selection of quality apps than Android?
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I'll admit, that I too am perplexed by this. What "amazing" Android apps don't already have an iOS counterpart?
 
FlameofAnor said:
I'll admit, that I too am perplexed by this. What "amazing" Android apps don't already have an iOS counterpart?
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Not the point. The point is that you'll be able to run mobile apps on your desktop/laptop OS - something you cannot do with iOS apps. Whether it's at all productive or useful is a whole another argument.
 
Dev use?

Perhaps it could be used by developers. I know this isn't an Android simulator, but I could see it (maybe) coming in handy for devs. It seems like they would just use the Android simulator, though.
 
devinher said:
I don't really get this. Why would you want to run Android apps on a Mac? Doesn't Mac already have a much better selection of quality apps than Android?
Click to expand...

Cross platform gaming, and access to Android only apps for your Mac. There are many apps for android I just wish I had on my Mac, and I have an Android phone, an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac and a PC.

TBH I almost only use my Mac/iPad/Android Phone, and next to never use my iPhone and my PC.
 
Well I think it's pretty cool. I'm not sure how the emulation works, but it could help developers maybe?
 
Bringing apps that require a touch screen to a PC with a keyboard and mouse. Genius.

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a0me said:
Console emulators? Google apps? Flash Player? Task Manager?
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There are Google apps on the iPhone. As for the emulators.... jailbreak :D:D
 
This is sorta useless for the consumer, for the dev, I have no idea. It's great they've got it working though.
 
I actually got Android for Intel processors running in VirtualBox. I think it was an outdated, illegit, Chinese edition though.

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It seems like it could only remotely be useful for games, and even the games already have PC versions anyway.

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roadbloc said:
This is sorta useless for the consumer, for the dev, I have no idea. It's great they've got it working though.
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This reminds me of iOS Simulator, which I tried fruitlessly for hours to get Cube Runner onto.
 
now I can run apps designed for touch input with my keyboard and mouse on my mac, just what I have been waiting for! :rolleyes:
 
Isn't this already possible with Eclipse and the Android dev tools? They have an emulator that lets you run/debug software you're building in Eclipse. I can't imagine that it wouldn't let you install your own.
 
faroZ06 said:
Bringing apps that require a touch screen to a PC with a keyboard and mouse. Genius.

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There are Google apps on the iPhone. As for the emulators.... jailbreak :D:D
Click to expand...
Google apps for Android have many features that the iOS version don't have... which is perhaps to be expected.
As for jailbreaking, in my opinion the security/privacy concerns outweighs the added functionality.
 
devinher said:
I don't really get this. Why would you want to run Android apps on a Mac? Doesn't Mac already have a much better selection of quality apps than Android?
Click to expand...

I'm no techy person but this was my first thought after reading the title. :D

There's more mac Apps than android and they're usually the first to come out then it becomes available for android. Is this not the case?
 
And what would be the purpose of running an app to run apps made for another platform on a platform where I can all ready get superior versions of the same apps?
 
a0me said:
Google apps for Android have many features that the iOS version don't have... which is perhaps to be expected.
As for jailbreaking, in my opinion the security/privacy concerns outweighs the added functionality.
Click to expand...

Jailbreaking does not open any security or privacy holes, but the thing that just keeps me worried is how it installs stuff like MySQL when you jailbreak. Would that slow it down? I've jailbroken my iPhone and only installed a couple of emulators and Terminal, and it seems to be running just as well as before, but I'm still wondering.

The only Google app I've been annoyed with has been their Maps app and its lack of voice navigation. Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm talking about this. All Google services are available fully on the PC anyway.

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iMikeT said:
And what would be the purpose of running an app to run apps made for another platform on a platform where I can all ready get superior versions of the same apps?
Click to expand...

I don't know, but I bet $20 that at least 1000 people will get this so they can use Flash on their Mac :rolleyes:
When the iPhone 4 first came out, 60% of the people surveyed thought it had 4G LTE.
 
Siggen said:
Cross platform gaming, and access to Android only apps for your Mac. There are many apps for android I just wish I had on my Mac, and I have an Android phone, an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac and a PC.
Click to expand...

Good luck playing those games without an accelerometer, digital compass, GPS and so forth.
 
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