Bluestacks' App Player for Mac is great for a number of reasons. If you're an iOS fan with a Mac but are wondering if Android might be something you'd like to try, without committing time or money, now's your chance. If you're an Android fan with a Mac and would like to run your favorite Android-only apps on your Mac, it's now possible.

Bluestacks has released its App Player for Mac into beta today. It had launched an Alpha release in June that was very limited in the amount of Android applications it supported, only about 15. With the latest release you can now run over 750,000 Android apps on your Mac, thanks to Bluestack's patent-pending "Layercake" technology.

Bluestacks has formed strategic partnerships with AMD and ASUS in the PC world and ASUS has already pre-loaded Bluestacks on 30 million PCs. The push to bring Android virtualization to PC and Mac is targeted at developers but also to users who have no desktop equivalent of their favorite mobile app. As noted by VentureBeat's Devindra Hardawar:

"Bluestacks' virtualizes Android to run the platform's mobile apps, similar to how VMWare lets you run a virtualized version of desktop operating systems. The company calls its patent-pending virtualization technology Layercake, and it's also partnered up with Asus and AMD to bring Android apps to their devices.

While most people probably aren't clamoring to run mobile apps on their desktops, Bluestacks is useful for those rare occasions where you need to run an app with no desktop equivalent. For example, there's currently no way to use Instagram without an iOS or Android device."

I've been using Bluestacks' App Player for Mac since its Alpha release in June and felt it had great potential but only being able to run 15 apps didn't make it a very useful app for me personally. I'm looking forward to updating my Alpha Bluestacks App Player today and trying out some of my favorite Android-only apps on my MacBook Air.

Bluestacks' App Player Beta can be downloaded for Windows and Mac here; I highly suggest trying it out.