‘Nokia X’ rooted to run Google Apps, and Nokia approves

The Nokia X has barely even seen the light of day and already one intelligent developer, fresh from MWC, has rooted the X to run Google apps. There’s even a forum posting that teaches you how.

Nokia’s X line of phones (the X, XL and X+) run a rather low-level version of Android, 4.1.2 so rooting it was fairly easy for the developer. The XDA forum user exploited the system at the core level with Gandalf (not the white-haired wizard), a one-click rooting app that works with most Android devices. Then, he installed an app to access the file system — there are thousands available for free on the Play Store — and copied over packaged Android files (APK) to the phones memory. From there, he installed the Google apps such as Gmail, Maps, Now launcher and Google Music.

Nokia X phones are incredibly inexpensive Android devices (from US$89) and are especially easy to root, judging from the instructions posted on the XDA forum. Yet the question remains, why did Nokia choose to release an Android phone that didn’t natively run Google Apps, nay the Google Play Store from the get go? Who knows, but Nokia applauds the efforts made by the XDA community. In this tweet (which is now offline), Nokia seems happy to let others play around with their toys:

For those who’re interested, here are the instructions on how to root a Nokia X smartphone.