Emulating Android apps and games on PC is easy, thanks to emulators like BlueStacks. It is a popular Android emulator, which is free and allows you to access apps and games from the Play Store. Now, the company has just launched the latest version of the emulator, BlueStacks 5.
The BlueStacks 5 is the successor to the previous version BlueStacks 4, which was launched back in 2018. The company has taken a considerable amount of time to bring out the successor.
But this long gap seems justified as the new BlueStacks 5 packs tons of improvements like faster boot, installation, and launch times. Whereas, although BlueStacks 4 was efficient, it was slow in installation and launching apps or games.
The emulator company managed to achieve this as the BlueStacks 5 is totally rewritten over the previous system. However, unfortunately, the operating system on which the apps and games are emulated on BlueStacks 5 has not been updated.
Just like the previous version, i.e. BlueStacks 4, the latest version of the emulator is based on Android Nougat (Android 7.1.2). It is pretty old as the Android Nougat OS came out in 2016.
BlueStacks 5 is currently still in Beta & can be downloaded for Windows and MacOS
To give you some insight, the latest iteration of the Android emulator, BlueStacks 5 works with as minimum computer resources as possible. Notably, it reduces RAM usage by almost 40%, which is nice.
The app interface is also tweaked and is now more clean and simple. BlueStacks 5 is still in beta but can be downloaded for Windows and MacOS. If you wish to try out and see what all changes the new version of the BlueStacks emulator packs, you can head over here.
After the installation when you first run the BlueStacks 5 emulator, it will ask you to set up just like you would do on your new Android smartphone.
You need to log in with your Google account for downloading apps and games from the Play Store. All the newly installed apps will be shown on the app drawer of the emulator’s interface.
The emulator comes with pre-loaded custom keyboard/mouse mappings for many popular games. So, it seems like the new version is more focused on gaming.
However, folks at Android Authority found the BS5 a bit unstable. They reported a few games and apps crashed while using the BlueStacks 5 emulator, and the Play Store tried to make them re-buy games that have been already paid for.
But that shouldn’t be any surprise, as the app is still in the Beta stage. We can arrive at the final conclusion only after using the stable version.