A new piece of software called BlueStacks App Player was official been released for public alpha testing on Tuesday allowing users to run Android applications natively on a Windows PC. This software was announced earlier this year and is finally in a state where anyone can get their hands on it.
BlueStacks seems redundant considering Google's Android SDK comes with tools to emulate Android apps on a Windows PC. The keyword in that sentence is emulate. The problem with Google's Android SDK is it emulates an ARM processor which makes running apps on the virtual device incredibly slow and unresponsive. BlueStacks looks to give developers another option for testing out their applications without having to emulate or dedicate an Android phone to development.
The standard version of BlueStacks App Player can be downloaded directly from the company's website. Currently the App Player will only install on Windows 7 (or at least that's what the site claims). The site does have an option to notify users when the Mac OS X version becomes available meaning they are hard at work getting this to work in that environment as well. This alpha version comes with 10 built in apps and allows the user to install up to 26 more of their choosing. A Pro version of the application is in the works which will remove the limit on the number of apps installed at once.
What's even more compelling is the Cloud Connect application allowing users to push Android apps from their phone to their Windows machine. Considering it's impossible to just jump on and access the Google Marketplace from your computer this is a really nice little feature. Additionally users can install APK packages via a tool called HD-ApkHandler. This lets developers load their APK packages into the App Player and have them appear in the desktop widget.
As someone who has recently started using Google Android SDK tools to test Android app code this is a welcome option. Having something that will allow my test packages to run at native speed on a development machine is worth its weight in gold. My only other option would be to push test packages onto my personal phone which is not something I am super enthusiastic about doing.
Are any of you folks Android developers or just people interested in pushing their favorite apps onto their Windows machine? Let us know what you think about the BlueStacks App Player in the comments.
