Bluestacks is an American tech 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 Windows PCs and Macintosh computers. The company was founded in 2009 by Rosen Sharma, former CTO at McAfee and a board member of Cloud.com.
Investors include [1] Andreessen-Horowitz, Redpoint, Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, Citrix, Radar Partners, Ignition Partners, AMD and others. BlueStacks is Sharma’s 8th company, with five acquisitions by Google, Microsoft, Citrix X 2 and McAfee. BlueStacks exited beta on June 7, 2014.
App Player
The company was officially launched May 25, 2011, at the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco. Citrix CEO Mark 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 a downloadable piece of Windows and Mac software that virtualizes the full Android experience. The software is free to download and use after adding a small number of sponsored apps, with the option to instead purchase a $2/month premium subscription.[3] According to company sources, the App Player can run over 96% of the 1.4 million apps in the Google Play Store.[4] It reached the 85 million download mark in April, 2014.[5]
On June 27, 2012, the company released an alpha-1 version of its App Player software for Mac OS.[6] while the beta version was released on December 27, 2012. The Mac OS version of App Player is no longer available for download on their homepage, as support for it was officially dropped in 2014. In April 2015, BlueStacks, Inc. announced that a new version of App Player for Mac OS was in development.[7]
GamePop
GamePop, was launched on May 9, 2013. It uses a subscription model. Users receive over $250 worth of paid games with their subscription.[8] It allows users to play as many as 500 mobile games on TV. On July 23, 2014 Samsung announced [9] it had invested in and was backing GamePop. This brought total outside investment in BlueStacks to $26 million. With an increased stride on improvements to its App Player, BlueStacks, Inc. put GamePop development on hiatus in 2015, with plans to improve the product at a later date.Reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks
