Bluestacks Android player hits 10 million downloads

Bluestacks Android player hits 10 million downloads

BlueStacks has announced that its App Player has been downloaded over 10 million times since its launch last year.

As the number of smartphone owners rises, so does the popularity of mobile apps. Nowadays, there is an app for almost everything that we can imagine. However, whilst speaking to CNBC, Bill Gates predicted that many users of iPads and Android tablets will get frustrated by the limitations of the devices because, “they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.” If BlueStacks latest numbers can be any indication, then Bill Gates might just be right.
BlueStacks’ ‘LayerCake’ technology enables users to run Android apps on the much larger screens of desktop computers, and is currently free to use in beta mode. People across more than 100 countries use the App Player to run apps like Angry Birds and Instagram on full screen, with users being most likely to use it for casual gaming, messaging and lifestyle apps.
“When we launched the beta we all took bets on where we’d be in one year,” said Rosen Sharma, BlueStacks CEO, to AllThingsD. “No one said 10 million.” The 10 million download mark has surpassed the expectations of all employees of the company. Even the most optimistic predictions guessed only a few hundred thousand downloads.
However, 10 million downloads doesn’t mean that the program has as many active users. Downloading an app and actually using it are two different things. According to BlueStacks’ Senior VP of Marketing, the number of active users is “spooky high,” but the company didn’t share any exact numbers.
BlueStacks’ App Player software is now also pre-loaded on PCs from several large device manufacturers like Lenovo and Asus. Aiming for even more downloads, BlueStacks is currently working to catch up to a more recent version of Android; a Jelly Bean-compatible release will be just around the corner.
The whopping 10 million downloads of BlueStacks’ App Player seems to indicate that there is a vast audience interested in running apps on their PCs. The added good news to the economy is that the spread in popularity of apps onto desktops will only fuel the already evident growth in UK developer jobs; in the first 3 months of 2013, the demand for developers has already seen an increase of 30 per cent compared to the same period last year.