More Nexus 6 Problems Arise with Android 5.0 Lollipop, Poor Benchmark Results and Other Issues
Google's Android 5.0 Lollipop continues to post more problems as Nexus users report additional issues. Aside from the slow performance and deleted apps, new information suggests that Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 performance issues may be due to the platform's encryption. Unfortunately, users cannot turn off the feature.
The Android 5.0 Lollipop gained considerable attention especially after screenshots were leaked showing the radical change. However, upon release, the new OS update has been hit with mounting complaints. Some Nexus users reported experiencing weird performance issues. The problems are even present in the latest Nexus 6 flagship.
The Droid Life reports that the performance hiccups were unexpected for the Nexus 6 since it comes with the newest and mot powerful mobile chipsets. Likewise, it features 3GB RAM which Google optimized specifically to support the Android 5.0 Lollipop update.
Anandtech reports that their Nexus 6 review including the normal storage performance benchmark results cannot be considered valid anymore under the Android 5.0 update. The site claims that despite the Androbench not being the perfect test platform, it does provide accurate results of basic storage performance. The Nexus 6 performance mishaps may be due to the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) feature of the Lollipop. Android can already do this during the Honeycomb era but Lollipop's setup made sure it is enabled by default. Once the feature is enabled, all disk writes already comes with encrypted information prior to commitment. Likewise, all reads come with decrypted information prior to being returned to the process.
The test found that there significant penalties through the FDE on the device. The penalty causes as much as 62.9% drop in random read performance. Whereas the random write performance goes down up to 50.50%. Motorola users may not encounter the problem since the company made sure to provide a build where the FDE is disabled. However, Google may have to release a separate fix for the Nexus line.