Is Bluestacks Safe (And Legal) To Use?
Android games are becoming more and more complex, to the point where today’s mobile games rival PC games from 5 years ago.
However, there are still plenty of users out there that don’t like mobile gaming, either because they hate looking at a small screen, or because mobile gaming kills your battery’s life expectancy.
Whichever the cause, those of you that still love the titles but not the console can always use an Android emulator as a compromise, such as Bluestacks.
Unfortunately, there have been those that have questioned Blustacks’ reliability, and that’s precisely what we will be discussing in the article below.
What is Bluestacks?
Bluestacks is one of the most popular Android emulators in the world, with very few competitors even coming close to its market share.
It is completely free, it doesn’t take up too much space, and if you set your PC to support virtualization, it will run any Android game as if it were a native PC game.
While not officially labelled a gaming app, that’s what most users install it for, since a small 1GB game will run incredibly fast on an average PC.
So, if you’re running resource-intensive games such as Wild Rift or RAID: Shadow Legends, might as well run them on your PC and spare your phone the death sentence.
Is Bluestacks Safe (for PC and Mac) to Use?
For starters, we need to discuss why so many users are concerned about the security of their PCs when it comes to using Blustacks.
Bluestacks triggers false-positives
Apparently, Bluestacks has a habit of triggering false-positives during antivirus scans.
What this means is that whenever you run a full system scan using your antivirus, usually McAfee or Avast, both the install kit and the Bluestacks process running in the background will be detected as potential threats.
Bluestacks asks you to disable your Antivirus when installing it
Another reason why people have trust issues with installing Bluestacks is that it asks you to disable your antivirus protection when you first install it.
However, that’s merely to avoid the issue mentioned earlier, since some antiviruses might prevent you from installing it entirely.
We’ve taken the liberty of testing Bluestacks on our PCs and found nothing malicious, neither in the installation kit nor in the Bluestacks process.
As far as we are concerned, Bluestacks is safe to download, install, and use, but remember that this can only be said about the clients that you download from the official Bluestacks website.
Bluestacks can be resource-intensive on low-end PCs
One common symptom of malware infections is usually high CPU use, and this translates into a slow PC.
Well, because Bluestacks uses virtualization, it can be quite taxing on low-end computers, so when users see that Bluestacks is slowing down their PC, they naturally think that malware is to blame.
Another well-known theory is that Bluestacks may be hiding crypto-mining software, which would explain the high CPU and RAM use.
However, our antivirus scans revealed no such thing, so that’s yet another theory that we consider debunked.
The real reason why Android emulators are so taxing, even on high-end PCs for that matter, is because Android and PC operating systems such as Windows or macOS have a very different architecture.
Because of this difference, a lot of hardware resources are lost during conversion.
Unfortunately, if your PC does have issues like the ones described above, there’s nothing you can do but uninstall Bluestacks, or simply use an alternative Android emulator.
Past versions of Bluestacks encouraged app rating and reviewing
Yet another reason why Bluestacks was not so well-seen is that it had a very bizarre way of sustaining itself in the past.
More precisely, you either had to pay the Bluestacks developers or download apps and rate them.
While the second option may sound innocent enough, the problem with those apps was that they contained a lot of adware, so Bluestacksended up being associated with malware, and thus the negative image.
Original Bluestacks versions came without an uninstaller
One of the biggest signs that a program may contain malware is that it is made to be difficult to remove.
That’s yet another that past versions of Bluestacks had since they didn’t provide you with an uninstaller.
Additionally, the Bluestacks install folder was made read-only, so manually deleting the files was out of the question as well.
Fortunately enough, this dark phase in the history of Bluestacks lasted for just a few months. Bluestacks now comes with a fully-functional uninstaller, and the install folder can be easily deleted manually.
Some users consider it piracy, like Nintendo emulators
Users love freebies, but they know that there’s always a catch, so they end up questioning whether Blustacks is legal or not.
This is because they associate Android emulators with Nintendo, Gameboy, or Gamecube emulators, and these are officially known to be illegal.
However, users need to remember that the only reason why they are illegal is because they include software copies of physical games, which is basically piracy.
This isn’t the case with Bluestacks, since all you download is the program itself, and the games you run are already available on the Google Play Store.
More so, remember the following:
- The Android OS is open-source
- BlueStacks doesn’t violate any Google Play policies
- The platform comes with Google Play Store built into it
- The Google Play Store will treat your BlueStack platform as a typical Android device
That being said, Bluestacks is 100% legal, so don’t worry if your PC is ever inspected and you have it installed.
VERDICT: Is Bluesctaks Legit?
All things considered, Bluestacks is safe and legal to use. Whatever issues it may have had in the past stayed in the past, and current-day tests proved that it is very reliable.
In fact, here’s a list of why you should trust Bluestacks:
- The install kit contains no malware
- It may slow down your PC, but for unrelated reasons
- Whatever antivirus alerts it may trigger are false-positives
In conclusion, go ahead and download Bluestacks, because it is safe, legal, and the best way to bring your favourite Android apps to the big screen.
