Playing Android Games on macOS: Among Us
In the early evening Adam talked about playing games. Currently his favourite game is Among Us. His sister, Alice, loves to play this game as well. But Adam doesn't have any device on which to play this game but he has an account on my Mac mini. So I suggested to look for an emulator that can run Android after it turned out that the iOS Simulator has no App Store.
I first tried ARC Welder, a Chrome extension. Next I downloaded the APK for Among Us but while it looked like ARC Welder loaded the file, I was not able to run it.
After some reading up on the Internet I found a mention of BlueStacks. When I visited the BlueStacks web site it mentioned Among Us game explicitly. Adam started to jump up and down from excitement!
After a long download, over 600MB, and several verification steps the program started and made clear that some settings on macOS needed to be changed.
First, in the Security and Privacy settings under the General tab I had to click the Allow button. Second, under the Privacy tab I had to allow BlueStacks to control my computer.
After these two changes the BlueStacks program still didn't want to boot. Because I had read that VirtualBox is used under the hood and I had already an instance running of this program I tried to save the Linux virtual machine and quit VirtualBox. But still no luck. So I followed the displayed advice of reseting the computer; and this worked!
After I had created a dedicated Google Account, I searched for Among Us in Google Play. When I clicked Install I was asked for credit card or other form of payment details, a step I skipped. And soon Adam was showing me Among Us with a huge smile on his face.
When all seemed to work fine I restarted VirtualBox and Adam logged into his account. When I started BlueStacks it complained about missing or corrupt files. After a short while the program solved this issue and we could repeat the installation of Among Us in Adam's session. VirtualBox didn't cause any issues.
It was a lot of waiting and involved one reset of the Mac mini, but well worth it.