Bringing Back "Android" To The Nokia X: Traditional Launchers And CyanogenMod

Bringing back “Android” to the Nokia X: Traditional launchers and CyanogenMod

BY Valerie Richardson

Valerie Richardson

Valerie is a 26 year old tech writer based in London, UK. She has prior experience working with major media conglomerates. She’s also a lover of all things tech — well, basically anything with a d...

All Articles by Valerie Richardson

Published 27 Feb 2014

Why trust Greenbot

We maintain a strict editorial policy dedicated to factual accuracy, relevance, and impartiality. Our content is written and edited by top industry professionals with first-hand experience. The content undergoes thorough review by experienced editors to guarantee and adherence to the highest standards of reporting and publishing.

Nokia’s expertise in the mobile industry is well known. And the Finnish manufacturer is trying to leverage its popularity even further by embracing the Android platform with the three new Nokia X devices.

But despite running Android at the core, these phones look more like a half-baked Windows Phone 8 device, thanks to the dense UI layering. So it’s obvious that this is a potential problem to people who have owned Android before. A new video demonstration has now revealed exactly how to deal with this.

This new video shows how easy it is to switch the stock Nokia X look back to something more familiar to Android users with the help of custom launchers (Apex, Nova etc). Other reports are claiming that a CyanogenMod build is already cooking up for the smartphone, so we might get to see that soon as well.

The demo below explains how to sideload the Nova Launcher apk to your Nokia X. Sideloading apps is quite crucial here as the three Nokia X devices don’t come with the Google Play Store (or any other Google service for that matter).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5O-DzFyevg

At €89, €99 and €109 respectively, the trio of Nokia smartphones are potential hot sellers in developing regions across the world. And if users can customize the handset according to their liking, well that’s just the icing on the cake.

[YouTube via Cult of Android]