UPDATED 12:41 EDT / JUNE 10 2013

NEWS

GamePop: Android Console that Plays iOS Games on Your TV

Android consoles are all the rage, and BlueStacks is hoping its new console could pull ahead the game with an amazing feature. The gaming console, GamePop, is far more than many consoles based on Android that are about to appear on the market.

Unfortunately, even today Apple is superior to Android in the gaming apps market with many exclusive titles first appearing in the iOS platform. BlueStacks, a start-up company, want to remove this difference allowing developers to launch their games for both systems. One of the first developers to utilize this option is Fieldrunners developer Subatomic Studios.

BlueStacks is adding support for games designed for iPhones and iPads on Android-based console. That means that iOS developers will be able to submit their gaming apps to GamePop and the company will automatically convert it to work on Android consoles or TVs, all through the Looking Glass technology.

The system would be similar to the method used for porting virtualization platform applications from Google to Windows 8 but with some crucial differences.

“From a technology perspective, it uses virtualitzation, but it’s a different kind of virtualization than what we use for example for our PC products,” said BlueStacks CEO, Rosen Sharma. “This is more API-level virtualization. We don’t use any of Apple’s bits – the developer just gives us the app and we make sure that it’ll run on GamePop.”

BlueStacks’ CEO wouldn’t describe how the Looking Glass technology works in detail, but he said Looking Glass works at the API-level. It embraces all aspects of running the game app and using the GamePop app as the controller.

“In iOS the app makes a call and says, for example, ‘draw a menu for me,’ and in GamePop the app would make the same call and we’d be drawing the menu for them,” Sharma said. “At this point, iOS and Android are so similar from an API perspective that it’s feasible to do this. So there’s no difference in terms of performance, and in fact developers on iOS follow such good guidelines that getting them on GamePop is relatively straightforward.”

The idea of being able to play games from the App Store on a connected console to a TV is exciting. GamePop differs from Android-based console OUYA, one of the popular startup game platforms for connected TVs, by virtue of its gaming plan. The console will cost you free if you pay a $6.99 per month subscription fee that gives you unlimited access to both iOS and Android games. OUYA is already hit a milestone as there are already 10,000 game developers working on titles for the Ouya gamebox. BlueStacks has promised to have “hundreds” of iOS and Android titles available at launch schedule for this month.


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