BlueStacks is one of the most popular android emulators available for your personal computers. With this software you can run android applications on your PC for free. Once installed it allows you to download any android application on your computer and run it. You can play games like Candy Crush or you can even run applications like Whatsapp on your PC. For detailed information on using BlueStacks app player and installing apps on it, refer to this article.

Now the problem is that when installing any app, it searches for a local BlueStacks market for the installer file. Sometimes what happens is that you write a name to search for and it fails to find the application in its local market. Many people have complained about such errors – when I click install it says “Market not found. Search web for installation recipe?” I have no idea what that means or how to fix it.

So what’s the solution for this error.

Install the APK file directly

• What you can simply do is download the apk files to your computer
• Once you have the APK file for any software or game, you can install the same using BlueStacks player.

Procedure

• Right-click on the .apk file and click on “Open with…”
• Click on “Browse…”
• Navigate to “C:\Program Files\BlueStacks” or for 64-bit computers, “C:\Program Files (x86)\BlueStacks”
• Double-click on “HD-ApkHandler.exe”
• Click on “Ok” [Check on “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” if you wish to associate apk with BlueStacks. I use this method, so now every time I just need to double click on apk to install new apps to my BlueStacks 😉 ]
• The .apk file will be install into Bluestacks and notify you when its done. You should able to see new icon to the apps that you just install on BlueStacks.

Install the application using Google Play Store

All android applications are available in Google Play store, do it does make sense if you can directly install the file from play store instead of installing it from a local bluestacks store.

• On BlueStacks main page, select My Apps (top main menu).
• Select Help from apps list. It will bring you to BlueStacks help forum page.
• On the address bar, change url address to play.google.com and press enter.
• You’ll be prompted to choose between Browser and Play Store, select Play Store and check on “Use by default for this action“.

• If you never used Play Store or any Google services on BlueStacks before, you’ll be asked for an account.
• You can use your normal google username and password. Or you can create a new account – your wish!
• Input your login and password to continue.
• There you go, play store now up and running.

Note: After login you may not found the app in the default app listing of BlueStacks player. So what you can do is just like browsing Android Market on Android phone, find your apps and install and launch it. That is installed through Android Market has to be launch from Android Market. Android Market also require internet access no matter to launch the apps that already install. So there might be a problem if you are offline (not connected to internet all the time).

Install the Google Market Play Store App

In some cases (older version of BlueStacks), the play store application was default installed. If the app is default installed, then it is pretty easy to simply open the play store app and install other application from it (this will avoid above method to go to help and then install the apps).

However now the Google Market Play Store app is not found and you have option to install it.

• Go to this article and download One.Zip file (it has all installation files which you will need).
• Extract and install the files in this order (click on .apk file -> “open as” -> choose HD-ApkHandler.exe from bluestack installation dir. to install). This is same method which we talked in item1.

App installation order:

• GoogleServicesFramework.apk
• OneTimeInitializer.apk
• SetupWizard.apk
• Talk.apk
• Vending.apk
• Gmail.apk
• Maps.apk