BlueStacks: how gameplay broadcasts help an Android PC emulator

BlueStacks is a shareware program for launching Android applications in Windows and Mac OS operating systems environments. The platform supports all Google Play applications. BlueStacks was founded in 2011. The popularity of the platform is growing rapidly. Now the LayerCake technology, which lies at the heart of BlueStacks, has already been used by more than 100 million people worldwide.

With this platform, both ordinary users who want to play mobile games on the big screen of their PC or laptop work, and developers who test their applications with comfort. We have long wanted to look at the "kitchen» BlueStacks from the inside, and we managed to do it. Employees of the company from the USA and Russia agreed to give an interview to Habrahabr. And today we are publishing this interview. But first, let's see why the streaming market of Android applications is so important today.

According to experts, the video streaming market will grow to $ 70.05 billion by 2021. A significant part of this market is streaming games, especially when it comes to eSports. According to forecasts, this year cyberindustry will bring market participants about $ 500 million profit. The eSports market is constantly growing, now cyberindustry has become an autonomous unit, although it was recently sponsored by large gaming corporations.
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Experts from SuperData claim that in 2016, eSports competitions will be watched by 213.8 million people around the world. This year, League of Legends from Riot has become the most popular game among the spectators. The average monthly audience of this game is 98 million viewers. They watched 450 million hours of play in half a year through the Twitch streaming service. Call of Duty with 75 million users ranks second in popularity among viewers, and FIFA16 with 23 million people is in third place.

How important is the streaming is indicated by the purchase by Amazon of the streaming service of Twitch computer games. The amount of the purchase was almost $ 1 billion. Mobile games are gaining popularity in the world. The company Bluestacks was the first on the market of Android-streaming, and, of course, one of the first in the field of emulation of games for the Android platform for Windows.

Questions to BlueStacks Marketing Director Yuriy Yarovoy, USA

Yuri, how long have you been in the company and how did it start? What are the successes today?

I am the senior director of marketing in the company - this is where all my work lies. And I am not an engineer, and I want to focus on this in advance, so it’s dangerous to ask technical questions to me.

BlueStacks has existed for just over 6 years, we launched the alpha version only in 2011, and the full product available to everyone in the 12th. Well, I'm on the team for 2 years at the moment.

How did the company come about? Typical garage story or not?

No, but no less interesting. The fact is that our CEO has Rosen Sharma, a deeply corporate background, in the field of software, and associated with information security. And BlueStacks is his eighth company - he sold the previous ones to Citrix, McAffee, Google and other giants. All those companies worked in the field of corporate information security.

BlueStacks grew up on the basis of our CTO (Suman Saraf) streaming enthusiasm - his children asked father questions from the “why can't I play this game on a computer?” Series - it was about CandyCrush at that time. And Suman began to think about this idea with Rosen - after some time a prototype appeared, in principle reflecting the basic idea and immediately attracted a lot of attention.

We remade the beta and went with it to CES, where we won the software of the year nomination - this happened in 2012.

The product is free, how can you earn?

It is really free, although we have a premium subscription for $ 2 per month - this is primarily premium support, plus a slight acceleration of the performance of the product itself, as well as the disappearance of advertising. We monetize through advertising and affiliate applications, the so-called. sponsored

Are there many competitors and how are you growing now? In general, you were the first in this area or not?

It was in the emulation of Android applications, we were probably the first. Right now, this market is showing explosive growth, especially in China, where the largest gaming market in the world. Mobile games on the PC are also very popular there.

We have a lot of work in China. Tencent and Kalpu have their own products in the domestic market, and new startups in this area appear in the region of Southeast Asia, China, moving from there in breadth.

And what plans, or hopes, for the future? Is iOS emulation possible?

I cannot answer in detail from an engineering point of view, but my opinion is that Apple very strictly guards its garden with fruits. Apple does not want you to do anything with their software and their infrastructure, which they so diligently built. Android is favorably different in this sense and, probably, we are lucky that now it is the most common mobile OS in the world, with a share of about 80%, if I'm not mistaken.

In fact, there can not be such a situation in which some great product will appear for iOS and will not work for Android and vice versa. We just want to act in a comfortable environment. And now it is the Android OS.

What about your employees?

Now the company employs about 130 people.

And in 2012 they were? ..

A few people. We grew up so quickly, in many ways, because the market is very large, there is a high demand for it and we have an almost endless list of features that we want to give to the users.

We evolved from the simplest interface to tabs and multitasking (which appeared on Android in the same form a little later) from tabs to streaming and so on - our users instantly adapted and asked for more. Now we support Facebook Live and for this a lot of work has been done. In China, we have become partners of the two largest local streaming services for the same - to expand opportunities for our users.

After all, look how interesting the situation is with streaming and live broadcasts, especially outside the gaming industry - there is almost no structure there. Around the smartphone with the masses are constantly walking masses, including those who "speak to the camera," showing themselves. By showing the viewer the screen of the phone or application, you set the focus of the interaction with the viewer. And giving the person the opportunity to give exactly the context of what is happening (on the screen of your phone), we believe that you can grow at a very high rate. It makes no difference, in fact, what exactly you are streaming from your screen.

Our goal is simple - to be the most used mobile gaming platform on PCs in the world. We want to be the Steam of the mobile gaming market, but at the same time we do not focus on Steam in the sense of copying - we have our own way ... We will not build any one tool, but will be a powerful platform that allows gamers to receive and send information unite with other players and ultimately share any content. This, from my point of view, is good for Steam - it has a very tight community, and we are aiming there too.

And we have already taken the first steps: this is virtualization and streaming.

But what about Twitch?

Right now we are giving users stream on Twitch, so for us it is not a competitor, but one of the channels for distributing content generated by users on our platform.

Questions to country manager Nikita Zatsepin, Russia

What technology stack is used in the current version of BlueStacks?

In BlueStacks, we use our own virtualization technology called Layer Cake. One of our key technologies is the use of hardware acceleration for Android applications running under Windows, which allows you to run applications for mobile devices on various Windows devices. We have created a user-friendly data entry framework that allows mobile applications to work on Windows devices (PC, Surface, etc.).

What is used for streaming data in an application?

The BlueStacks App Player uses Open Broadcaster Software to provide streaming data to the application. But it should be noted that we have created a custom add-in that allows the user to stream in one click, which the standard OBS does not allow. We also developed our own method of modifying the displayed image, which allows users to customize their streams (aka filters). By customization, we mean various kinds of background images (including dynamic ones), chat output, links, and so on. In the future, the list of functionality will only grow, for this we are constantly collecting feedback from bloggers and streamers.

What is the target audience for BlueStacks? Are these gamers, developers or someone else? Is the BlueStacks audience in Europe / USA and China different from the product audience in the CIS countries?

Our product occupies a very specific niche - we provide the ability to consume mobile content for those users who do not like (or can not for some reason use) smartphones or tablets, but want to use the mobile applications and opportunities provided by the Android ecosystem. Thus, we provide the needs of both gamers and regular users. We do not yet provide a large number of opportunities for developers (although the situation is gradually changing, especially after a number of user requests from Russia), but it should be noted that, unlike other similar emulators, BlueStacks is a product for the mass market.

Our goal is to combine the vast ecosystem of Android applications with the familiar world of personal computers, without inventing a bicycle. All you need to do is install the program, log into your Google account, and that's it — you can play everything you want, from Clash Royale to Township. Moreover, we provide support for other applications. Therefore, if you are not a gamer, but a user who needs Instagram, Snapchat or any other non-game applications, you can also work with them under Windows.

As for the differences between users from different countries, the difference is certainly there. For example, Koreans and Chinese are more willing than other users to play MMO and RTS games.

If we talk about users from Russia / CIS, then, unfortunately, we see a low level of general computer literacy. Of course, this does not apply to Habr in any way, but it’s quite usual for an ordinary, ordinary user to explain the advantages of such a complex technology product, which is the BlueStacks App Player. But we have thoughts on how to correct the situation, and we are working on it.

Some foreign products pay little attention to their Russian users - less than in other countries (or they do not interact with them at all).

Therefore, we are trying to provide not only a good localized product, we are trying to support mobile gamers from Russia. For example, we recently organized a tournament for 1,000 people (of course, there were many more people willing), inviting them to compete in the Clash Royale Championship. Places in the tournament ended approximately 5 minutes after the password was announced. The event was covered by YouTube Aurum TV and Max Look (each has 500k subscribers on the channel, these are the largest channels in the RU / CIS zone). The audience took this championship very well: about a million total views of videos, and thousands of positive comments. Most likely, in the future we will repeat this experience with other popular and competitive mobile games in Russia.



What difficulties did you encounter when developing the second generation of BlueStacks?

One of the main difficulties we faced was the display of running Android applications in the form of browser tabs familiar to Windows users. This was the main problem.

If your application has flaws, can you name them? When are you planning to solve the main problems mentioned?

One of the notable problems that we encountered is that many Android applications are not optimized for use on a PC, so they do not work out of the box. To solve this problem, we created an intuitive mechanism for interacting with such applications on a PC using a keyboard and mouse, and also developed a simulation system for some sensors in order for applications to work correctly.

After Google announced support for Android apps on Chromebook (Chromebook), the situation changed. The PC form factor becomes significant for mobile developers, and we hope that in the future Android applications will support it out of the box, which will certainly have a positive effect on their compatibility with our product.

There is an opinion that BlueStacks is quite picky about PC resources. Is this true, and if so, is it planned to reduce the resource intensity of the platform?

Yes, we continue to work on reducing the resource intensity of the platform, optimizing its performance. For example, after the release of BlueStacks App Player 2.0, our platform definitely began to work better on a number of PC configurations. This task is one of the most basic, and we put a lot of energy into it.

Are you going to release the BlueStacks version for other platforms?

Not yet. We do not force our users to upgrade to the latest versions, as many technology companies do (we will not call them), so you can work with version 1.0 for Mac or even for Windows. But we no longer support these versions, that is, we do not fix existing bugs. Instead, we focused our efforts on creating better products. Only after we bring our program to the ideal on Windows, will we start working with other platforms.

Are you working on BlueStacks 3.0? If so, what new features can you name now?

Yes, the new version is in development. We are working on something that will completely change the approach to mobile games on the PC. As soon as we are ready, you will definitely find out about it.