It’s now extremely easy to run Android Apps on Mac thanks to Google’s ARC Welder extension for Google Chrome.
ARC Welder is a simple extension which allows you to easily run an Android app on your Mac or PC with no need for any other software.
All you need is the Google Chrome browser. This means you can finally ditch the Bluestacks Android emulator for Mac which is no longer supported on OS X.
There’s also no need to install a virtual environment like Parallels because ARC Welder works straight off of Google Chrome. In this example, we look at how to install the Android version of Instagram on Mac.
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How To Run Android Apps On Mac
1. Make sure you’ve installed Google Chrome on your Mac. If you already have it, make sure it is updated to version 40.0 or higher.
2. Open Chrome and click here to go the ARC Welder extension page.
3. Install the ARC Welder extension and click the green Launch App button in the top right corner or you can search in Spotlight on your Mac for “ARC Welder” and launch it that way. You’ll see the APK Welder icon appear in your Dock:
And the application will will launch on your Mac:
4. You must first click on Choose to select a folder for ARC Welder to use. Select any folder you want such as your Applications folder on your Mac. When this is done, ARC Welder will then prompt you to upload an APK file:
5. You must now find an APK file for the application that you want to upload to ARC Welder. An APK is basically an application installation file. There are various sources on the internet from where you can download them such as APKMirror.com or you can do a Google search for the name of the application you want and then the word “APK”. It’s important you download the latest version of APK available for the application you want to install of you want to use the latest version of it on your Mac. If you download an older version, you will obviously end up running an older version of the app instead. Note that you cannot obtain APK files from the Google Play store. When you have the APK, just click on Add your APK and browse to the downloaded APK file on your Mac. In this case, it’s the Instagram APK:
6. You will see a few settings to configure. This simply affects how the app appears on your screen but in the case of Instagram, select Portrait and Phone so that it appears on your Mac, just as it does if you were using it on your phone. Clipboard Access simply means whether you want to be able to cut and paste text from your Mac into the application.
7. Simply click Launch App in the bottom right corner and the app should launch immediately. 
You can then use Instagram on your Mac, just as if you were using it on your iPhone or Android device:
At the time of writing ARC Welder is still in development stage. There are some apps such as Netflix that won’t work at all in it and some features of Instagram that crash it. For example, you can take photos with it but after the photo is taken, Instagram crashes:
The only way to recover the app from this is to close the window and go back to ARC Welder and click Launch App again. However, in the case of Instagram, when you relaunch, the photo you took does at least appear in your gallery but if you try to publish it online, it will crash again.
ARC Welder isn’t perfect. Google Apps for example won’t run it properly because there’s no access to Google Play and therefore no access to Google Services but this may be added in the future as Google improves it. You can only run one application at a time at the moment too. However, it’s definitely the fastest and easiest way to run Android apps on Mac if you just need occasional access to one app such as Instagram.
If you have any problems or questions running Android apps on your Mac, let us know in the comments below. If you want other ways to install Instagram, don’t forget to check out our article on How To Use Instagram On Mac.
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