My wife got a VeryfitPro fitness monitor for Christmas. I have the app loaded on my Android (6) phone and was hoping to install a companion app on my Windows 10 laptop but the only thing available is to install an Android emulator on Windows 10 then load the phone app into that. I did a google search and found a list of the 7 best emulators. The list was

  1. BlueStacks
  2. Remix OS Player
  3. Droid4x
  4. MEmu
  5. Nox Player
  6. AMIDuOS
  7. Windroy

I tried Bluestacks and ended up at an online poker site.

Remix resulted in This site can’t be reached

Droid4x gave me Failed to load page content

At this point I was sensing a pattern so perhaps soneone out there can recommend a decent and free emulator.

yialeks commented: I like Bluestacks emulator! Sometime I'm using it, so hope you will also like it! +0

I don't know if this will work for you. It's rather large and has more than just the emulator. I use the emulator in Android Studio. Maybe someone has it "all on its own" but I haven't searched for that. If I was to search I think it would be this one: https://www.google.com/search?q=run+avd+emulator+without+android+studio

I do want to comment that miscreants have hijacked common searches so you look for a thing and end up at other sites, malware sites or worse.

I have favorite apps like VLC Player but when folk tell me they looked for such they got malware. PITR.

Well, I installed Android Studio and it does not include an emulator.

Looks like that option is far more complex than I need. The first step was to run

emulator -list-avds

to list the available AVDS. My list came up empty. However, emulator -help game me a list of 200 or so options and switches. While I would like to run an emulator, am not willing to invest several weeks in figuring this out. Thanks anyway. I'll spend my time figuring out the VerifyFitPro for which there is almost zero documentation (thatincludes the Android App as well).

I would have likely been fired if I gave my users a custom app with the instructions "You f##king figure it out.

But I'm not bitter.

I use the Android Developer system and only had to setup the emulator one time using some menu in Android Studio. Once you get it setup in AS you should be good to go. I have no tutorial on this handy.

I followed the install procedure and it failed to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable so the advmanager.bat file wouldn't work. using some menu in Android Studio is too vague to help (I apologize if I sound ungrateful) and when I fired up AS to start hunting through menu items it just sat ther spinning with "Waiting for build to finish" even though I haven't tried to build anything.

Sorry that I don't have a tutorial on this one. While I do work on Android apps in AS and use the emulator I did have to be patient as the system finished setting up.

All of us at the office use this one. Good, bad or indifferent we use it. I went so far as to install Intel's accelerators to the emulator and it's very usable. The only thing that I wish it could do is better Bluetooth emualation. That is, if your PC has a Bluetooth system the emulator doesn't use it so you have an emulator with something missing. Our apps use SPP (serial port profile) on Android so 99% of the time we have a real Android target over USB.

I uninstalled then reinstalled AS and started a new project with the bare minimum interface. At least I now have a tools -> virtual device manager option so I'll work with that for a while.

Got it working. Thanks for the help.

You have the bona fide official emulator now. I wish it was easier.

I wish everything was easier ^_^

commented: It runs on VirtualBox within Windows (or Linux, etc). You can set it up to mimic various Android devices. Plus...install Gapps. +0

hi! I already tried No. 5: Nox Player
I was really satisfied :)
I wish you success!

@rproffitt - I ended up uninstalling Android Studio as the emulator didn't support Bluetooth so there was no way to connect to the device. In the meantime I was able to locate a detailed manual for the device which cleared up some of the problems I have been having.

@ReverendJim, yes and here our apps use Bluetooth so to write it was a challenge to get the Bluetooth tickety boo is an understatement. The first Bluetooth we used was way back on PalmOS which it's emulator was lacking as well but I did manage to set it up to use the Windows BT stack to a Com port and then in the PalmOS emulator use the Com port which worked well enough to get it all going. Later that feature failed but thank goodness the engine under it all was gold.

Now with Android, I've yet to find an emulator that included Bluetooth so for that the device as host for the app and debugging with USB was how it got done.

Hope this isn't too boring.

commented: Not boring at all ^_^ +15

I have been using Bluestacks for years on my Citrix VDI and Work Laptop. Never gave any problems, I believe by mistake you landed up in wrong place. And you can use BrowserStock for Websites. Try the below link this will help.

https://www.bluestacks.com/apps.html

Its very simple, download blue stock from internet and install on ur system and once its installed u can install apps what ever u want as per requirement like, FaceBook, Insta etc.

Their website states that BlueStacks is "free to download". I've been burned by this several times where the software is free to download but you have to pay if you want to run it. For the limited use I'd make of it I am not interested in buying something. I'd just as soon do without. So is BlueStacks free to use or just free to download?

Hello again Reverend Jim. I will write Bluestacks is not what it seems. You can find more with research but here it's on our suspicious software list. That is, if a client has PC troubles this gets removed. More at https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/42k1sw/avoid_bluestacks/

I don't see any emulator that implements a Bluetooth stack for what I think you initially wanted this for.

My view: Avoid.

Avoid

I had pretty much come to the same conclusion.

Usually there won't be any problem with Bluestacks .

commented: Yup, there is a problem with Bluestacks. Look up to see where it is. -3

Nox Emulator is my favourite for some time. I used to use bluestack and barely ever thought the stability of it but now, with nox, not only you can install and run everything in stable environment but it also provides some manual hack abilities that let you cheat in some games that are pay to win.

I been facing issues with Bluestacks for a few months now moved to Nox but even it is doing the same thing :( , I dont know ,what will be next one for me.

commented: Bluestacks isn't what it seems. See https://www.daniweb.com/posts/jump/2251836 +15

Bluestacks is the mostly used android emulator but I use KoPlayer as some times there were problems with Bluestacks ,you can find more informations from my facebook page facebook

Nox is the best one, has many features

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Top Free Android Emulator for Windows 10

  1. BlueStacks.
  2. NOX Android Emulator.
  3. MeMu Play.
  4. Android Studio.
  5. Remix Player.
  6. Droid4x.
  7. AMI Duos.
  8. Genymotion.
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