Though there are all sorts of emulators for running older computer applications or operating systems, emulators truly rose to popularity through the gaming community. If you’re unfamiliar, an emulator allows one piece of hardware or software to behave like an entirely different system. One genre of applications you’ll never see on iOS: emulators. On occasion, this can lead to dangerous apps being allowed into the store, but more often than not it means that some applications are destined to remain Android-only due to Apple’s guidelines for certain types of apps. Though Google does manually approve and publish apps onto their store, Android apps don’t fall under the same level of scrutiny and restriction as their iOS counterparts.

One of the great things about Android over other mobile operating systems is a reduced amount of control over the apps that are allowed to be uploaded and offered on the Play Store.