Nox

Site: www.bignox.com/
Purpose. Android emulator
Country: China ??? Ops
Price: Freeware
Opensource: No

Today I was going to talk about this nice Android emulator I use. In my case, it came with the 4.4 Kitkat OS installed. The only things I install are Google Store based apps, and although it tends to crash after some time using it with apps like Instagram and its pictures and videos, it works nice. It also has a multi-account setup, so if you want multiple accounts, you can even run them in parallel. There seems to be a VM running inside Nox, but I'm not 100% sure.

What scared me after starting to write this was that I found that this is supposedly coming from China and that there have been reports of stolen accounts, etc. Furthermore, Nox seems to "phone home" to China IP's every now and then, according to security sources, and it's encrypted. So all in all, it's not something I'd advise.

You also have Bluestacks, an USA program doing the same thing, supposedly being the source from where Nox derived. I don't remember liking particularly, everything looked less smooth, but tbh, I wouldn't like some hidden App hacking my store/google account, although it's SMS-protected and all. Tbh, I've been using Nox for 3 months without any problems. May be it has to do with the kind of apps that Nox can run. One thing I notice is that Nox keeps installing icons for Apps everytime I open one of my Apps on the emulator. May be they are enticing like a fox.

Anyway, Nox works great, and you have top control of your emulator from outside, meaning, you can share files from the Android filesystem to your OS, and reversely.
If you're playing games inside the emulator, you can take screenshots or record your gaming and you can even ODS it, it's just another Windows program.