Bluestacks is an American technology company that produces the BlueStacks App Player and other cloud-based cross-platform products. The BlueStacks App Player is designed to enable Android applications to run on PCs runningMicrosoft Windows and macOS. The company was founded in 2009 by Jay Vaishnav, Suman Saraf and Rosen Sharma, former CTO at McAfee and a board member of Cloud.com.
Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm,Citrix, Radar Partners, Ignition Partners, AMD, and others.[1] BlueStacks is Sharma's 8th company (five of Sharma's companies have been acquired by Google, Microsoft, Citrix (twice) and McAfee). BlueStacks exited beta on June 7, 2014.
May 25, 2011, at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco. Citrix CEOMark Templeton demonstrated an early version of BlueStacks onstage and announced that the companies had formed a partnership. The public alpha version of App Player was launched on October 11, 2011.[2]
App Player is downloadable Windows[3] and Mac software that virtualizes the full Android experience. The software is free to download and use. It also provides a premium option which enables faster gameplay, premium support, and exclusive offers from developers for a $2/month subscription. The subscription is optional.[4] According to company sources, the App Player can run over 96% of the 1.4 million apps in the Google Play Store.[5] It reached the 109 million download mark in Dec 2015.[6]BlueStacks works with a rich variety of peripherals allowing for a new, arguably better, way of navigating and interacting with Android OS. Use your mouse, keyboard, and external touchpads to control your virtual smartphone.[7] On June 27, 2012, the company released an alpha-1 version of its App Player software for Mac OS.[8] while the beta version was released on December 27, 2012. In April 2015, BlueStacks, Inc. announced that a new version of App Player for Mac OS was in development. In July 2015, BlueStacks, Inc. released the new version for Mac OS.[9] In December 2015, BlueStacks, Inc. released the new version BlueStacks 2.0 for Windows which lets users runs multiple Android Apps simultaneously.[10]
On April 7, 2016, the company released BlueStacks TV which integrated Twitch.tv directly into the BlueStacks App Player.[11] This addition allows users to stream their apps to Twitch without the need for extra hardware or software. BlueStacks released Facebook Live integration in September 2016, allowing users to stream their gameplay to their Facebook profiles, Pages they control, or Facebook Groups they belong to.[12]
Minimum requirement for Bluestacks include: 2 GB or higher memory, 4 GB space in hard drive, and Direct X 9.0 or higher installed.[13] The user also requires administrator privileges, cannot run on the user's PC if BitDefender is installed and the user's computer graphic cards should be updated to the latest versions.
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