Android apps on Windows 8
Users of Windows tablets will be able to run applications written for Android.
BlueStacks, led by former McAfee Technology Director Rosen Sharma, has developed a program that allows you to download and run Android applications on both Windows 8 tablets and Windows PCs.
The application under the unambiguous name BlueStacks App Player, according to the developers, will be fully integrated with the new mobile platform from Microsoft, so that very soon any of the 400 thousand Android applications a Windows tablet user will be able to run on a par with those made specifically for Windows 8. This means that developers will no longer have to waste their time and money for porting from one popular platform to another. It is enough to place your application on the Android Market – and voila – it turns out to be on two platforms at once. However, this, in turn, may undermine the Microsoft mobile application market.
BlueStacks App Player works extremely simply: you download the program, open it, download the app you like from the internal market and play. Moreover, if you have an Android device available, you can easily transfer the application from it to your Windows tablet or computer. In the latter case, the application will be controlled with the mouse.
The alpha version can already be downloaded from the company’s official website. The program works properly, you can use it to run Talking Tom 2, Aporkalypse, and Pulse. Another thing is that applications, according to subjective feelings, slow down a little even on powerful machines (the developers themselves claim that applications slow down only on old tablets and netbooks).
In addition, the situation with the internal market is not quite clear yet. Now there are only 26 applications on it. The developers promise that almost the entire Android Market will be presented in the release version, but how BlueStacks are going to charge for paid applications, for example, is not disclosed.
At the moment, developers are also making a Mac version. And, by the way, external investors have already invested $ 14 million in BlueStacks.
