500 Mobile Collective places its first bet on an Android OS that runs on PCs

Imagine all your apps and games running on your Windows or Mac PC just as they do on your Android phone. We’re not talking of an emulator that lets you run a few mobile apps on your desktop. This new thing is a full-featured Android operating system in the cloud that can run on any Windows or Mac PC.

What you get is the complete Android experience on your desktop – the same Android user interface, which you can tweak, and access to all the Android apps and games on the Google Play Store, which you can sync with your phone. In other words, you can have the same computing environment on all your devices.

It’s called Andy OS and it quietly launched nine months ago. Already it has notched up 3.5 million installs with 60 percent daily active users. And it just got US$3 million in seed funding from 500 Mobile Collective, DeNA, China Rock Ventures, Weiming Angels, Cherubic Ventures, and SEA Ventures.

Sean Murphy, co-founder and CEO of Andy OS, tells Tech in Asia why the world desperately needs a new operating system:

Android has over 80 percent of the mobile OS market coverage in the world, and on the other side you have Windows with over 80 percent of the entire operating system market. For the most part, these two operating systems do not talk to each other. None of the tons of killer apps that have been developed for Android can run on a PC and vice versa. This, for consumers, is anything from annoying to a real problem.

So an OS you can use on any device quickly caught the imagination of Edith Yeung, who manages the 500 Mobile Collective, a new mobile-focused fund launched by 500 Startups.. Andy OS is the first investment from this fund, and Yeung tells Tech in Asia just why:

Android is the number one OS in India and most other places, except probably Silicon Valley. At the same time, we have two to three billion desktops and various form-factor tablets. So what Sean and his team at Andy OS are working on is something that is super-strategic for us. I think the next couple of investments that we will be doing are also going to have an infrastructural focus, supporting the mobile ecosystem.

The biggest number of installs so far of Andy OS, just organically, have come from the US, India, and Brazil. Once it starts getting marketed after the funding, China is a huge potential market too. The Asian connections of Edith Yeung and her 500 Mobile Collective will then kick in.

“One of the things that is super interesting to me is that India is one of the top three markets,” says Yeung. “Andy will be able to go even a lot more in India because many people there, who do not have smartphones, are still accessing the internet on desktop devices. They will also be able to use Android apps on their PCs, through Andy.”

Why game developers will rejoice