Nexus 6 & 9 Plagued by Performance Hiccups Blamed on Android 5.0 Lollipop Robust Security Feature
One killer feature that Google proudly delivered with the Nexus 6 and 9, both powered by Android 5.0 Lollipop, is default data encryption.
Full Disk Encryption or FDE is turned on by default on first boot on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 6. It appeared too that the same will happen on Android devices that will soon jump to Lollipop or will have Android 5.0 out of the box.
While the security feature is mostly welcome, it also resulted to performance slow down as pointed out by Droid Life. FDE, according to the Android-focused site has been identified by AnandTech as the culprit on the alleged performance dips reported by Nexus 6 and 9 users.
With the feature in effect, read-on disk is lagging by 63 per cent while write-on can go as low as 50 per cent, Droid Life reported the AnandTech finding as saying.
What is the fix?
The solution seems a no-brainer - toggle off FDE. Google, however, is not allowing that to happen, at least not at the moment. More truthfully, there is no assurance that Google will soon or ever allow a tweak on the same feature.
"Google is encrypting new devices that ship with Android 5.0 at first boot. They are actually warning developers about this," the report added.
What to do?
In the absence of an official solution, Droid Life points to the hack offered by XDA Developers. The procedure mainly involves some tweak works on that boot.img that will turn off FDE.
Two things, however, must be weighed on before taking this action. First, security of the Nexus 6 and 9 (or other Android 5.0 devices for that matter) will never be the same as designed by Google. On this respect, it is a choice between performance boost and tougher privacy protection.
Second, tinkering with the default Lollipop setting could be deemed as a modification move that will void the device warranty.
Option
As Droid Life has pointed out, the Nexus 6 is packed with a very powerful processing chip that taps into 3GB of RAM yet its read-write performance proved sluggish compared to the yet-updated Nexus 5.
From all indications, Google holds the key to the problem - by allowing Nexus 6, 9 and other devices on Lollipop users to opt out of the data encryption feature.
