Jide Technology released its own Marshmallow-based Android app emulator for Windows (7 and newer). This marks another step in the company’s strategy to become a more popular desktop environment for users in any way possible.
Remix OS is Jide’s Android-based alternative mainly to Chrome OS (with Android apps), but it also serves as an alternative to Windows and other full desktop operating systems. The company announced early this year that users could also install Remix OS on older PCs following the merger of the open source Android-x86 project with Remix OS.
This move drastically increased users’ access to Remix OS if they didn’t want to buy a certain hardware product, such as Jide’s own Remix tablets, or one of the products from its partner OEMs.
Jide seems to have now found a way to make Remix OS even easier to access, and now users can simply download and install it as a Windows program. Remix OS Player is an emulator like Google’s Android emulator and other competing products, such as Bluestacks. It allows users to install Android apps just as they would on their mobile phones or tablets, but use them on their PCs in a desktop environment.
Remix OS Player is one of the few, if not the only, product based on Android Marshmallow, as most competing emulators are still based on Android “Lollipop” or even “Jellybean.”
Jide seems to have prioritized gaming optimization on the Remix OS Player, both in terms of performance and in features, such as button mapping. If you have at least a Core i5 computer, which is the recommended CPU specification (although Core i3 should be sufficient, too), you can even play two games at the same time.
Keep in mind that this is still an emulation of another operating system on top of your desktop OS, which is why the specifications are rather high for what are essentially only simple Android games. Jide also recommends a minimum of 4GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, and users should enable virtualization in their BIOS settings if it isn’t enabled already.
Remix OS is free to download for Windows users, but support for macOS should be coming soon as well.