BlueStacks Ready to Test Its Android-on-Windows Software
BlueStacks, a start-up focused on allowing Android apps to run on Windows PCs, said it is ready to start public testing of its software. — The company is making an alpha, or early test version, of its software available to the public.
Context & Ripple Effects
BlueStacks' public alpha lands at the moment Android has stopped being just a phone OS: comScore put Android at 40 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers in August 2011, after it overtook the iPhone in share earlier that year, and its app catalog is now treated as prime media real estate rather than phone filler.
The start-up's bet is that this catalog has value on the one screen where Android has no presence — the Windows PC. If the alpha works, every Android developer gets a desktop distribution channel without writing a line of new code, and Microsoft's own app ecosystem suddenly has a rival runtime living inside it.
First-order effects
- Windows PC users gain direct access to Android's app catalog through the alpha, and Android developers get a second distribution surface for their existing binaries with no porting effort.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft faces Android apps running natively on its own desktop OS, pressuring it either to build an equivalent bridge itself or to treat third-party runtimes as a threat to Windows' app-store economics; PC makers gain a differentiator they can bundle at zero licensing cost to BlueStacks' terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the operating system stops being the boundary that defines which apps a device can run — the runtime layer does — and desktop-versus-mobile app ecosystems converge into a single market where whoever controls the compatibility layer captures the distribution toll.
The trend: Mobile app platforms are expanding onto the desktop through third-party compatibility layers, a gap that OS vendors themselves will eventually move to close.