Tired of Android? Try your luck with Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Firefox OS
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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