Being one of the first owners of Nokia X in the Philippines makes us excited to install Android apps immediately. Of course you know that Nokia X family has a forked Android on it, that’s why we called Nokia X as half Android and half Microsoft. It has the same Nokia Lumia feel, the tiled home screen is still there, but Nokia has pre-installed your fave Android apps on it like Facebook, Viber, Skype (of course, this is a Microsoft product), BBM and a lot of games. The other Android apps can still be installed via the procedure called “sideloading”.
In the press materials provided to us it says you can get apps from the Nokia Store or install 3rd party app by sideloading it. Remember that side loading app was the tweak made in Blackberry 10 when Snap was not yet available then. And it was hard to side load Android app to Blackberry, then.
With Nokia X, we managed to install two Android apps without any problem. We downloaded the APK (Android application package file), transferred it to the Nokia X, perform the install and boom! In the photo above, I have the Instagram installed and it was running without any problem at all. We also managed to install Google Maps successfully. Here’s the screen shot showing the newly installed Anroid Apps – Instagram and Maps.
How to sideload Anroid App on Nokia X
- Download a valid APK
- Connect your Nokia X to your laptop
- Using your file manager, navigate to the storage of Nokia X, select a folder to upload the APK file, in my case I uploaded it to the Download folder of Nokia X
- Disconnect Nokia X from the laptop
- From the Nokia X, run the pre-installed Astro file manager, navigate to the Download folder and Run the APK file
- Finally, before you can install a third-party app, you need to enable installation from unknown sources, tick “Allow installation of apps fro unknown sources” this pop-up will appear before you proceed.
- Enjoy the Android app!
