BlueStacks 2 tested: The cross-platform Android app player

BlueStacks is a program that allows you to run Android apps on your Windows or Mac platform. It was originally designed for entertainment, as the first iteration boasted compatibility with games found in the Google Play store. Today, BlueStacks announced the launch of BlueStacks 2. Like its first iteration, this program has the same core functionality, but it comes with various improvements for better user experience, and more integrated functions.

We’ve put together a quick experience piece of how BlueStacks 2 works, and how it can grab your existing account data across different types of apps, such as social media, games, and cross-platform integration.

Disclaimer: the copy we have is a press preview, and it is not the final version. You can get the updated version for free at the BlueStacks website.

Overview

First, the new BlueStacks 2 adopts a browser-like interface for accessing your apps. Tabs of apps will show at the top, and if you encounter an app with an ad, you can always view the ad later as BlueStacks 2 will open it in a separate tab instead. The BlueStacks interface can also run multiple apps in different tabs all at at once now.

Setup

Setup is an easy process and for this experience article, we've chosen to install it on a Windows based machine. After the installing BlueStacks 2 on your machine, log in to it using your email account (the same account used for your Google Play content on your smartphone). Setting up the BlueStacks account is as easy as choosing the same email address in the menu’s selection box. Once those are done, simply enable app sync. All three steps are done within the same menu, making it a painless endeavor. One interesting interaction we noted was how our Google account informed us of a sign-in from "Chrome on Mac" during our setup process.

Social Media

The interface adopts the smartphone orientation when you launch your apps. In this case, we chose Instagram for our trial because it’s one of the few social apps that doesn't have a desktop equivalent. As shown here, you can choose to view your app in the typical upright portrait style or choose to view it in the wide landscape style that better utilizes your screen space.

Gaming

The original BlueStacks was primarily used for  playing mobile games by its 100 million worldwide users. Since we know how the first version ran games, we decided to try and see how easy it was to log into an existing game account. It was a success; in our example, the game uses the Google Play Games app to manage the account details. All it took for us was a quick download of the Google app onto the dashboard, and clicking once to log in to Google Play (as the email was already bound to this BlueStacks 2 program). The rest was as simple as going into the game app itself to pop in. If your games are tied to your Facebook apps, the same thing applies, with the only difference being Facebook acting as your game account login.

Desktop-to-app File Access

The new BlueStacks 2 also boasts a fluid Desktop-to-Android file access experience. You can see how the original BlueStacks version handled this here. Comparatively speaking, the current method adopted by BlueStacks 2 is painless. In our example, we were trying to upload an image to our Instagram account using a photo that had undergone some changes in the desktop version of Photoshop. To do that, we first had to choose the file and that can be done by selecting the folder-shaped icon on BlueStack 2’s menu to the left.

The file select dialog box pops up and you can direct the program to the file/photo you would like to work on. Once the image is selected, BlueStacks 2 will ask you which app you intend to open it in (a la typical Android OS). So in this case, Instagram it is.

Other Functionalities

While handy in messaging, social media, and gaming, BlueStacks 2 is not as complete as it can be. An example would be using apps that are paired to devices via Bluetooth. We tried to use a Plantronics app to control a pair of their headphones, but BlueStacks 2 simply refused to start the app. There’s actually Netflix compatibility, but we won’t really know until Netflix is officially available in Singapore come 2016. That said, BlueStacks has a very active developer site that addresses user problems, and many older issues in the first BlueStacks were resolved or patched in BlueStacks 2.

The outlook for BlueStacks 2 is a bright one indeed and we hope our preview has given you a good overview of what to expect out of this handy application.

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