How to install Android Applications on your Windows/Mac Computer?

I know! How we wish we could use our favourite Android Apps on Windows or Mac, right? We, people who love Android, love world without borders and technology without operating system boundaries. For us, an ideal world will be a world where we can use any application on any operating system. Like I said in my last post, we love Android because of its openness. But Android is as open as only Android can get.

What if we could use some of the Android Applications on our PC or Mac? That World would be an ideal world. Hopefully that world is yet to come. Until then, we need to rely on emulators. They did it on Blackberry Playbook once. If you are an Android geek, i am sure you remember how someone created an Emulator for Android on playbook. There was also news of someone installing Gingerbread or Honeycomb on a Linux system.

But that is Linux System. Most of us use Windows. And we do not have the tech background to install Android OS on a Windows PC without killing it. The only hope we have is an Android Emulator for Windows or Mac. And the hope is finally here!

Bluestacks! Blustacks allows you to emulate Android Apps as they are seen on an Android phone. Is that not cool? Yes, it is! I tried the emulator and the first thing i tried to emulate was the app that is so popular - Pulse. Though I do not like Pulse much for eating all the battery on my Android phone, I love its design. And I was absolutely stunned to see that Pulse looks and feels the same way on your PC when you emulate it using Bluestacks as you use it on your Android phone.


Now remember, you can emulate your Android using Bulestacks only if you are using Windows 7. You Mac Application is on the way. And Bluestacks is in Alpha, so do not expect bug free performance.  Now if you have an Android Phone, you can use Bluestacks Cloud Connect to transfer some of you favorite Applications to your PC. Bluestack Cloud Connect can be downloaded from here.

If you are someone who is thinking of moving away from iOS or Blackberry and want to see how Android Apps work, Bluestack is certainly  something you might want to try.

Troubleshooting: Remember that Bluestacks is in Alpha. In other words, Bluestacks is out in its most rudimentary form. Some of you may find that Bulestacks does not install on your Windows 7 PC. Do not panic! There must be some issues with the file you have downloaded. Reboot your computer and try installing Bluestacks again. If that does not work, download the installation file once again later and try to install Bluestacks on your PC

How to solve Android dialer force close?

You take out your phone to dial someone and see that the phone dialer is not allowing you to go to your contacts. It simply force closes every time you click contacts. You see something like "android.process.acore" stopped working.

What can you do when your phone dialer force closes as you are trying to reach someone so desperately?

Here are a few things you can do:

Try rebooting your phone. Switch off the phone, keep it off for a few minutes and switch it on again. See if this solved the problem and your dialer is not force closing.

If this does not work, switch off the phone again, take out your sim card and battery and put them back again after a few minutes and switch on the phone.

Rebooting usually helps. Now, if it does not help, there must be some issue with syncing the phone contacts with your gmail. Head over to your gmail and see if there is a problem opening your contacts on a web browser on your computer. If there is a problem opening your gmail contacts on a web browser, the problem of your dialer force close is due to some wrongly entered field in your gmail contacts. Try and figure out which contact has a wrongly entered field.If you can resolve the issue with the gmail contacts, your dialer may start working again. Now, if you do not have your computer near you, disable syncing on your phone for a while, reboot your phone and see if the issue with force close is solved. If de-syncing solves the force close issue, you can go to your gmail contacts later and correct the wrongly entered fields.

Usually rebooting your phone or de-syncing your phone helps to solve the dialer force close issue. However, dialer force close or android.process.acore fore close issue is something related to the core processing of your phone. The issue must be because of an application you have recently downloaded. The android dialer is force closing because the new application process and the dialer process are clashing. Try uninstalling new applications that you have installed. Go back to your dialer to see if the force close issue is solved, after uninstalling each new application.

Usually, the issue is with a recently installed app that you downloaded from somewhere other than the Android Market. Remember that apk file you downloaded from somewhere because someone told you it is cool? Ya, go ahead and delete that from your system. In other words, try deleting applications that are not from trusted sources. (In my case it was the Google+ App for Ice Cream Sandwich that caused the issue. Google+ .apk for Icecream Sandwich was leaked recently]

And sometimes the issue is with applications that require phone permissions. If you can figure out which application is causing the dialer or contact force close issue, you may not have to uninstall every other new application.