BlueStacks Android app player hits 5 million installs, could end up on Windows RT tablets

BlueStacks Android app player hits 5 million installs, could end up on Windows RT tablets

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.