Run virtual android on windows

How to run Android apps in Windows

When it comes to app selection, few platforms rival Android. Unfortunately, using your Android phone and tablet apps isn’t normally possible on Windows. There are ways to use your apps on a full screen if you know how to run Android apps in Windows, though. This way, you can enjoy the best Android apps and the best Android games on the big screen.

If you’re running a Chromebook, we’ve also put together a dedicated guide on how to install Android apps on Chrome OS.

Emulating Android on Windows

The easiest way to run Android apps on Windows is through an emulator. We have two different emulators, both with different focuses. If you’re interested in development, Google offers Android Studio, which includes an Android emulator. It’s really only for developers, though, while our two recommendations focus on end users.

Bluestacks

The Bluestacks App Player is one of the most popular and robust Android emulators around, allowing you to run 32-bit and 64-bit games and apps for Android 7.1.2 (Nougat) on your Windows desktop.

It’s free to use, and you can easily toggle emulation settings and launch apps using the custom-designed interface. “Layercake” technology uses hardware accelerators to improve the performance of Android games running on Windows-based machines.

If you have a Twitch or similar account and a PC with more than 8GB of RAM, you can even broadcast Android apps and games using the Bluestacks “stream mode” and OBS Studio. However, users may want to enable AMD-V or Intel VT-x within the BIOS for optimal performance, if available.

Bluestacks offers an optional subscription ($4 per month or $40 per year) that enables premium support, disables advertisements, includes wallpapers, and more. It’s also now compatible with the Galaxy Store, allowing you to use and play apps purchased through Samsung’s app store.

Here’s how to install Bluestacks to your computer:

Step 1: Download the installer from the official Bluestacks website.

Step 2: Launch the install application and choose the storage location for the app and data files. Unfortunately, you can’t change the Bluestacks directory — it will install on your boot drive by default.

Step 3: Once Bluestacks installs, launch it and enter your Google and/or Samsung account credentials. You’ll need this info to log in to the Google Play Store and Galaxy Store and access your Android app library.

Genymotion

While Bluestacks is focused on apps and games, Genymotion provides the full Android experience (though at the cost of performance). Genymotion offers several paid emulation modes, including an option to run Android emulation from the cloud. There’s a free version for personal use.

The app runs with Virtual Box, so you’ll need to download that beforehand. Otherwise, Genymotion supports templates for basically every popular Android device in existence, and you can emulate the experience with different devices using different versions of Android.

Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Download VirtualBox for Windows.

Step 2: Download Genymotion for personal use.

Step 3: Open Genymotion and select Create Account. After you’re done setting up your account, activate it, and log in with your credentials.

Step 4: Click the Plus icon and select a device you want to emulate. You can also emulate a custom device.

And that’s it! Like Bluestacks, you’ll want to enable AMD-V or Intel VT-x in your BIOS before getting started. Genymotion can emulate Android 4.4 onward. Keep in mind that it’s focused on developers, so it’s not as user friendly as Bluestacks.

Dual booting

There’s an alternative to emulation that gives you newer versions of Android, but the setup is a bit more involved. It’s called “dual booting,” and it effectively transforms your Windows computer into an Android device. You’ll gain the option to boot into Android when you switch on your computer, and Android will work just like it does on your smartphone or tablet.

However, getting started is not as simple as installing native Android. Because computer hardware — processors, graphics cards, and hard drives — must be added to Android by a third-party developer, you’ll need to find a custom distribution that supports your machine.

Android-x86

Android-x86 brings Android to x86-based PCs with AMD and Intel processors. What’s interesting about this project is that users can install any flavor of Android, whether it’s the now-stale Donut (v1.6) or the more recent Pie (v9). The project even offers builds of LineageOS (cm-x86) that can run on x86-based processors.

For those seeking a more recent Android build, Android-x86 9.0-r2 was the latest release at the time of this publication. Based on Android-9.0.0_r54, it fixed an audio issue on the Surface 3 and another one regarding booting into UEFI mode. Contributors have released more builds since, though for earlier versions of Android.

Though customizations to the Android operating system are minimal, the Android-x86 team did add some meaningful tweaks to give your Android install a desktop-like interface. It comes with features like a new Taskbar launcher and the ability to launch apps in resizable windows rather than just full-screen.

Android-x86 also lets you customize Android to your liking. You can install third-party themes, home screens, and more without having to worry about whether or not they will play nicely together.

To use Android-x86, your PC must have:

• An AMD or Intel processor.
• 2GB or more RAM.
• 4GB or more disk space.
• An available USB port.

If your PC meets the requirements, you will need these three tools:

• A blank USB drive.
• Android-x86 downloaded to your PC
• UNetbootin downloaded to your PC.

Now let’s get started:

Kevin Parrish/Digital Trends

Step 1: Find and open UNetbootin and click the Three Dots button to the far right of Diskimage.

Step 2: Locate and select the downloaded ISO file.

Step 3: At the bottom next to Type, select USB Drive from the list, and then click OK.

Wait for UNetbootin to copy and install Android-x86 to your flash drive.

Step 4: Reboot your computer. This may require you to hit a specific key to prevent Windows 10 from loading, like ESC or F12. A screen should appear allowing you to select Boot to the Boot Device Selection.

Step 5: Select your flash drive.

Step 6: From the UNetbootin menu, select Install Android-x86 to Hard Disk.

Step 7: Select the partition — or location — to which you want to install Android-x86. The program will ask if you plan to format the disk. If you’re unsure, don’t.

Step 8: Select Yes to install GRUB and then select Yes again.

Step 9: A prompt asks if you want to “make system r/w,” which enables Android-x86 to read and write data to your hard drive. Select Yes.

Step 10: Reboot your computer for the second time. Once installed, use the Google Play Store to install Android apps as you wish.

Link to Windows

Microsoft’s Your Phone app allows Android phone owners to send and receive texts from their Windows PC without using their mobile devices. Users can also access their phone’s photos from Windows 10 and see phone-related notifications in the Action Center.

Samsung takes this cool relationship one step further with Link to Windows. This technology now provides two services: Phone Screen and Apps. With the former, you’re essentially streaming a Samsung phone’s screen to an interactive window on your PC. With Apps, you’re streaming individual apps rather than mirroring the phone’s entire screen.

However, all Android apps remain on the Samsung phone. Moreover, this method requires the Windows 10 PC and Samsung Android phone to be on the same local network. Microsoft provides a list of compatible Samsung phones here — not all Samsung phones support Link to Windows.

Finally, this method requires the Windows 10 November 2019 update (at the very least) to work properly. All Samsung phones must have Android 9 or newer.

Step 1: Open the Your Phone app or download it from the Microsoft Store if it’s not installed.

Step 2: Sign in to your Microsoft Account.

Step 3: Move to the Samsung phone. Swipe down on the Quick Panel and tap Link to Windows. If it doesn’t appear in the Quick Panel, download it from the Google Play Store — it’s typically integrated into newer Samsung phones.

Step 4: If other Microsoft apps are already signed in, you won’t need to do it again on your phone. If not, sign in manually.

Step 5: Allow permissions when prompted.

Step 6: The Samsung phone and Windows 10 should begin synchronizing. When complete, tap the blue Allow button on the Samsung phone’s screen to allow the pairing.

If successful, the Samsung phone will display a switch that’s toggled on — tap it to disconnect at any time. The screen also lists the connected PC’s name and the Microsoft Account login name.

Step 6: With the Your Phone app open in Windows 10, click the Gear (settings) icon in the bottom-left corner.

Step 7: Verify that the Display My Phone Screen option is on.

Step 8: Select the Phone Screen or Apps option on the left to begin.

Surface Duo and Microsoft’s Emulator

The Surface Duo is a high-tech piece of equipment that first came out on September 10. This dual-screen device is a folding Android smartphone that operates on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC.

It supports the same Link to Windows program that many Samsung devices do, and you can use the official Google Android Emulator with it, too.

Источник

Android-x86

Run Android on your PC

VirtualBox How To

The following are instructions on how to run Android-x86 inside VirtualBox.
Note: For optimal performance, make sure you have enabled either VT-x or AMD-V in your host operating system’s BIOS.

Android-x86 versions tested against Virtualbox versions.

Date Tested	Virtualbox	Host OS	Android-x86	Result
??	2.2.4	Windows XP	??	Good
??	3.0.2	Fedora 11	??	Good
Nov. 2 2017	5.2.0	Windows 10	6.0-r3 32/64 bit	Good

Downloading

Download an ISO of Android-x86 from here.

Caution

Create a new VM

If you have not already created a VirtualBox virtual machine for Android-x86 yet, do so as follows:

1. Click the «New» button, and name your new virtual machine however you like. Set Type to Linux, and Version to Linux 2.6 / 3.x / 4.x. Note that you should choose the appropriate bit type for the version of Android-x86 that you downloaded.
2. Specify how much RAM will be allocated to your virtual machine when you run it. Android doesn’t specify a bare-minimum requirement for memory, just keep in mind what apps you plan on running. 2GB (2048MB) is a good place to start, and you can change this later if you need to.
3. Create a new Hard disk image which will act as your machine’s storage. The recommended starting size of 8GB is enough. Click through the rest of the options for creating your Hard disk.

Your virtual machine has now been created. It still needs to be initially installed at this point.

Settings

Tested on VirtualBox 64-bit for Windows, version 5.2.0. Android-x86 version 6.0-r3, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Select your machine, then click the Settings button and refer to the below recommended configuration to make sure your settings match.

• [System] Recommended: Processor(s) should be set above 1 if you have more than one virtual processor in your host system. Failure to do so means every single app (like Google Chrome) might crush if you try to use it.
• [Display] :
  1. Optional: Video Memory may be increased beyond the minimum selected automatically. The affects of this are unknown.
  2. Mandatory: Unless guest additions are installed [1] , change the default VMSVGA to VBoxVGA .
  3. Optional: Enable 3D Acceleration may be checked. The Linux Guest Additions must (VirtualBox v6.1+) / may (VirtualBox v6.0 and below) need to be installed [2][1] to get any benefit from this. Failure to do so means you won’t even be able to launch Android-X86 in the first place. [3]
• [Storage] Find the first «Empty» item (this should have an icon of a CD). In the Attributes, click on the CD icon with a small down arrow, and pick «Choose Optical Virtual Disk File. «. Specify the Android-x86 ISO that you downloaded.
• [Audio] Intel HD Audio seems to be natively supported in Android-x86.
• [Network] By default, your installation of Android-x86 will be able to automatically connect to the internet. If not, you can try to enable WiFi in Settings/Network & Internet, and connect to showing VirtWifi. If you do not want to connect to the internet in VirtualBox, uncheck Enable Network Adapter under the Adapter 1 tab.

Install

Click the green Start arrow to power-on your virtual machine. You’ll be presented with a list of options. Use the arrow keys to pick which one you want, then press Enter once the one you want is selected.

1. If you don’t want to install Android-x86 yet and just want to test it, pick one of the Live CD options (except for Debug mode).
2. Pick the Installation option if you want your system to be installed to the virtual hard drive.

If you want to use higher resolution, you can edit the boot option by pressing TAB, change vga=788 (800×600) to vga=791 (1024×768) or vga=794 (1280×1024), and press Enter. You can also use vga=ask to see all available modes. But please note Android will only work under 16-bit mode.

Partition

When you are prompted to Choose a partition:

1. If you upgrade Android-x86 from a previous version, just select the existing partition. Agree to overwrite it when prompted.
2. If this is a new VM, choose to Create/Modify partitions. Use Bootable but not GPT! This will cause the GRUB installation to fail later.

You may partition your disk however you see fit. If you just want a simple installation, create one partition taking up the entire disk and format it as ext4 .

Continue through the installation. You should install GRUB when it prompts you to. You may also leave /system as read and write when prompted.
Once the installation is complete, force close/shut down the virtual machine and remove the ISO from the virtual CD drive.
Finaly, start Android-x86. If it’s a new machine, once loaded you can perform the Android setup to begin using your machine.

Advanced

Custom partitions, SDCard

When booting Android-x86, you may specify which partitions represent the data and sdcard. On the boot menu, select an entry you would like to boot from, press TAB, then add the following as it suits your needs:

DATA=sda1 SDCARD=sda2 Press Enter to boot. These options specify user data (your setting, your uploaded applications, . ) go into /dev/sda1, and data saved in sdcard go into /dev/sda2.

If you build the ISO from source, you can add these options to bootable/newinstaller/boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg.

Here is a note from David when using fdisk:

1. Create a new virtual machine with a hard disk.
2. Launch the Live ISO in Debug mode (I used android-x86-2.2-generic.iso) to get the commend prompt.
3. «fdisk /dev/sda», then type:
   1. «n» (new partition)
   2. «p» (primary partition)
   3. «1» (1st partition)
   4. «1» (first cylinder)
   5. «xx» (choose the last cylinder, leaving room for a 2nd partition)
   6. «w» (write the partition)
4. Repeat #3, but call it partition 2, and use the remaining cylinders.
5. «mdev -s»
6. «mke2fs -j -L DATA /dev/sda1»
7. «mke2fs -j -L SDCARD /dev/sda2»
8. Reboot («reboot -f»)
9. At the boot menu, choose VESA, then hit TAB and type so that the end of the line reads: «DATA=sda1 SDCARD=sda2». (Only need for the generic target images, for VM target images, this is not needed)
10. After booting (and of course disabling mouse integration via the machine menu), the SD card is read as unformatted, but you can format it by going to Settings > SD card & phone settings > Format SD Card, then Mount SD card.
11. The SD card should now work!

Note: for the step 7, if you want to format to vfat only, then you can do :

Also remember the partition type has to be fat32 (b or c). By using vfat, the step 10 is not needed.

DevTools application has a MediaScanner which (re)indexes your SD card for cases where you manually copied media over. This ensures that you see new images and/or music in the apps without having to reboot.

If you downloaded it from within android, the application asks the relevant service to index new files.

Playing music

This section describes two ways to upload music files into Android running on a vbox so you can play them by the Music app. Of course, you can save the files to the virtual disk mounted at /sdcard, as described above.

Upload files by adb

Adb is Android Debug Bridge, a tool to debug Android system. If you compile from source, it is located in out/host/linux-x86/bin/adb. Otherwise you can get it from Android SDK. Suppose the network of your vbox is OK, you can upload a file from your host by

You need to know the ip of your vbox. You can get it by Alt-F1 and netcfg. You may also need to reboot Android to see the uploaded files. Of course in this way you have to mount /sdcard to a virtual disk partion.

For complex network settings of the VirtualBox VM, you should refer to Debug How To on how to connect adb to the VM.

Upload files by wget

You can also upload files by wget in the debug mode. In the debug mode shell, before entering Android,

Debug with adb

This section describes the way to debug Android with adb via network.

If we want to debug with adb via network, we should ensure the ip of vbox can be accessed by host machine. So we should change the Network Adapter type of vbox to Bridged Adapter. After starting the android-x86, we should follow the above Settings/[Network] section to ensure the network of android-x86 is enabled, and enable USB debugging in Settings/System/Developer Options. Then we can get the device ip from Settings/System/About tablet/IP address. For example, if we see the ip address is 192.168.0.116, then we can use following command to connect android-x86 in vbox from host machine.

Источник