Tired of Android? Try your luck with Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Firefox OS
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Firefox OS are mobile phone operating systems that all want a piece of the smartphone market. We try out these ambitious mobile alternatives on a Nexus 4 phone.
Android and iOS command a colossal lead over everyone else who has tried their hand at a mobile operating system – including Microsoft's own Windows Phone, which is stuck in a distant third place. The other systems that exist in the huge mobile space are asking what it will take to be number four. In this article, I tour some alternative mobile operating systems, including Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Mozilla's Firefox OS. I tested each of these alternative systems on my LG Nexus 4 (Figure 1).
In the following sections, I'll show you how to set up each system on a Nexus 4, and I'll offer some observations on the user experience.
If you have a spare Nexus 4, you might want to follow along and try this experiment. (At the end of the article, I explain how to get your phone back to Android.) Who knows? You might discover you like one of the alternatives better than Android.
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