Gadgetory

it'd be fair to say that here at under the authority we like Android and why wouldn't we after all it's a highly versatile operating system it's got a very intuitive UI it's highly customizable there's tons of great games and great apps in other words it's just a joy to use and with that in mind you might find yourself wanting to use it on something other than a smartphone or a tablet how about a nice big PC for instance so you can get it up and running on a wide screen monitor whilst you lean back in your swivel chair you can get Android running on watches you can get it running on televisions on devices that fall in half probably on washing machines so surely it can't be that hard to get Android up and running on a PC and in fact you're right there's tons of ways you can get Android running on a desktop so in this video we're going to look at seven different ways and which one might be the best for you okay so option number one is going to be to run BlueStacks on your PC BlueStacks is an Android emulator and of course an emulator is a piece of software designed to help your PC or whatever is running it to mimic another system in this case Android BlueStacks is one of the most popular and one of the oldest Android emulators one of the first to work well it's completely free and that's allowed it to get a big following and a lot of support BlueStacks works well for running games it's fairly quick it's not perfect it's better for something like a strategy game or for a puzzle game there's a lot of those on Android if you're gonna run an action game you might find that a like it becomes a bit of a problem it's also far from a stock Android experience in the past there's been a bit of feature bloat it's kind of slowed it down made it sluggish and big they've scaled that back down lately but it's still far from a stock Android experience you'll run your games from a kind of menu and you'll find that not everything is supported you can run the Play Store you can open the Play Store if you want to install games that way the ones you've already bought but not everything will be supported in there certain things crash it's not perfect but if you can find a game that's supported by BlueStacks that you want to play it's easy to install it's free you might as well give it a go it's a good enough experience option number two is to run another emulator called Andy and these a competitor to BlueStacks and it works very similarly performance is on par so it's not perfect but it's okay but if a puzzlin is for action games but it has some features that BlueStacks doesn't have such as the ability to change the launcher as you like you can even route your Andy emulator meaning can run certain applications that need root access in order to operate there are some problems with Andy though the reason I'm not showing any clips of it running on the screen right now is because every time I try to install it it's frozen at 94% and that's on two different machines and I'm not alone in that experience at the same time when I tried to install it it kept encouraging me to install a whole ton of bloatware search tools Chrome extensions antivirus stuff and that leaves a really bad taste in the mouth so some people have a good experience with it but be careful with this one and seeing as BlueStacks gives you a comparable experience I think that edges it out for me there are actually tons of other Android emulators of course and if you check out the link in the description down below you'll be taken to an article where we compare lots of different options some of them free some of them paid one of them even runs in Chrome browser so you can find which one is the best option for you there but they're all fairly comparable an Android emulator is decent it normally comes with some stuff padded in or you have to pay for it because of course these people want to make money and the performance is good but not great on the whole as a rule so option number three then is going to be something a bit different this is to run Android via the AVD manager that comes with Android studio and the Android SDK so AVD manager stands for Android virtual device a virtual device is a kind of emulator this aimed at developers so people who want to test the apps and the programs that they've made because it get this up and running you need to go to Android developers and download Android studio as though you would developer them this will also come with the Android SDK and tons of other stuff and it takes up a lot of space on your computer that's one downside of using this you'll then need to install the Android studio ide and this can take a while but once it's all set up you'll be able to use the AVD manager in order to create your own virtual device so you get to pick the size of the screen you want to emulate you get to pick how much space you want to give it how much power you get to pick which version of Android you want to install onto it and of course because this is the official option from Google that means you can download the latest version of Android and it's going to be available very quickly as soon as it rolls out of course developers need to be able to test their apps on the latest version before even the general public get their hands on it it used to be that these virtual devices didn't support the Play Store but the that's no longer the case as long as you pick the right hardware set up in the right version of the operating system has a little icon next to it then you could install the version of Android with the Google Play Store already set up so you can download all the games you've already downloaded or then once you've already paid for without them to pay for them again and play them on your PC now the best part is that if you choose an x86 image for your Android installation you can run it in an accelerated mode and it'll run almost as fast as it would do on a smartphone or a tablet and you can play games in this way and they'll run almost as quickly as they would do on any other device i played something the hedgehog no problem other twitch games are just fine and you can even get some 3d games working it's not perfect of course not every game and apps going to work I had difficulties trying to get asphalt 8 to work for instance because of course these games aren't used to running in this kind of environment but on the whole this is the smoothest and the most versatile Android experience I think you're gonna get on a PC the only downside of course is that you've got to take up lots of space on the computer and go through that installation process and if that puts you off then you might be more interested in option 4 which is to run genymotion so genymotion is an alternative to the AVD manager it's another virtual device aimed at developers but not from Google this time this once again lets you create a virtual device and then test your games and apps on your computer and it runs pretty quickly you can also access the Play Store through something called G apps now so that's great genymotion isn't perfect compared to the virtual device I find that it runs a little bit more slowly a lot of people say they find it's faster but I think that might have changed because in my experience games judder they're much slower and they're more likely to crash on me compared with using Google's option at the same time you're not going to get the very latest version of Android rollout straight away because you need to wait for genymotion to roll out their update but other than that it's another good option and it means you don't have to install the whole of the Android studio and the SDK on your computer if you've got less space or if you just don't want to go through that rather lengthy installation process then this is a quicker way to get it up and running it'll like - way to get it up and running but I mean it's negligible for most people put in the next one 10 minutes use up a couple more gigabytes and have a better experience running on your PC that's my take option number five is going to be a little bit different this one is installing android x86 through a virtual machine so you're going to download virtualbox set up a new virtual environment and then you can install the android x86 image straight onto there this image is created by coders by hackers it's an open-source project to make Android available on x86 architecture so you can download that free from their website then go through the process of creating a virtual machine then install it on there and then you want to save the state so that every time you load it back up you don't need to install it again otherwise you do for some reason it's not a perfect experience and your mileage may vary in terms of performance I find it runs quickly on one of my machines and slowly on another but it is essentially a native Android experience on the PC which is cool and if you stick it on a USB stick then you can actually boot from it without having to create a virtual machine so if you have an old computer sitting around in the corner of your room gathering dust then this is something can do with it and you can turn it into an Android device there's instructions in that link that I've talked about in the description down below and that'll show you how to go through this whole process for option number 6 we've got another image that you can install onto a virtual machine or onto a USB stick and this one's called remix OS remix OS is interesting because it's not aiming to bring a stock Android rather it's aiming to bring us a version of Android that has been desktop e5 that's definitely a word so in other words it has a taskbar it has a kind of Start menu type thing where you can select your apps and has better Mouse support and things open up in Windows sometimes so it's a bit more like using a Windows PC I personally find it runs a bit faster than the x86 option as well you'll still have to go through the lengthy process of setting up a virtual machine and then installing it on there and for some people that's going to be a plus if they enjoy that kind of thing but for other people who just want a quick way to experience Android that's gonna be a barrier to entry and it's still not perfect it's still slower than using the Android virtual device that comes with Android studio remix OS also comes with a tool that's specifically designed to help you set it up very USB stick for booting from so if that's something that appeals to you then that makes it nice and easy and maybe a little bit more tempting than using the x86 option finally option 7 to use remix OS player so if you like the sounds of remix OS if you want to try out a version of Android designed for a desktop environment but you don't want to go through the process of installing a virtual machine and setting up like that then you can find this remix OS player which is basically like an emulator it's a one-click installation or you know a regular exe installation will install a virtual device etc on your machine but you won't need to worry about it and you can run it that way I find it's a bit slower than installing it onto a virtual machine or onto a USB stick but other than that it's a great way to experience it I'd say it's more well suited to using productivity tools rather than games it's certainly something a bit different and interesting and it's easy to set up there's no reason not to give it a try so there you have it that's seven different ways to get Android up and running on your PC unfortunately none of them are perfect they've all got their perks and some of them are quite interesting to play around with my recommendation is for most people download Android studio it's a bit of a pain it's a bit of a laborious process we'll want to set up it does give you the best experience as long as you've got the space on your PC a second best option might be genymotion or perhaps one of those commercial emulators there's many more options of course though and you might find that one of the options in the link in the description down below is better suited to your needs let me know in the comments down below if there's anything I missed if you'd like to go over anything else if you want me to talk through how to set up Android on a virtual machine then that's something I could do in the future let me know if that's something you'd like to see I hope you found this video useful interesting guys if you did then please leave like please share this around please comment please subscribe to the channel keep it tuned to Android or 30.com and check out the website for we are your source for all things Android on all devices