Encryption Disabled

[vaughaag]

A guy I work with disabled his encryption last week and has been saying that his battery life has improved considerably and that file access is faster.

I have had no issues with the speed of the Nexus 6 but I am a heavy user and was finishing the day with between 10-17% battery. I decided to follow and decrypted my phone two nights ago.

Having only used the phone unencrypted for a day I cannot give a full and tested account of any changes but what I can say is that battery life seems to have improved, I had 33% remaining with a screen on time of 4h12m yesterday and had used it just as much as normal. I have also noticed that when using apps such as Adobe Acrobat, QuickPic, Messenger, Camera and WPS Office, file access and folder population is a lot faster and smoother.

At the time of writing this post, I have a screen on time of 2h38m with 76% battering remaining. Screen set to 45%, no wifi available so all data via 3G.

I followed this guide, Disable Forced Encryption on the Nexus 6 for Faster Performance « Nexus 5

A few things to note;

i) There is a new version of the Nexus Root Toolkit that will find and download the unencrypted boot image but you will still need to download the userdata image linked in the guide, (a factory reset should achieve the same end as flashing the userdata image).

ii) If you have TWRP Recovery, the phone will boot loop until you have flashed the userdata image. Simply reboot back into the boot loader and use the Nexus tool to flash the userdata image.

iii) This will wipe your device, so backup any data, pictures and/or files. You will need to setup your phone after disabling encryption.

Some users on other forums advised taking a full backup using nandroid and titanium before completing the decryption so that you can roll back if needed, I did this but am unsure if it would work as I have not had need to test it.

 

[B. Diddy]

Interesting, thanks! I've always been wary of encryption, since most authorities warn of small decreases in performance (as well as encryption being irreversible on unrooted phones). This is also why I'm the Dr. Dinosaur in the hospital who continues to carry a pager instead of setting my phone up to receive pages as text messages--the latter would require me to encrypt the phone, due to patient privacy issues.

 

[vaughaag]

I found a video on YouTube yesterday where a guy compared his Nexus 5, a before and after if you like - Nexus 5 - Android 5.0 Lollipop - Encrypted vs Une…: http://youtu.be/2gmdRlg0vag

Yesterday was day two of no encryption for me and I got 5h48m screen time, that more than an hour more than I was averaging before. GSam is now showing my average screen time per charge at 5h28m where as before it was 4h13m.

As for a speed increase, you won't notice it much. I have a lot of pdf's and word documents on my devices and that's where I notice the difference but its seconds not minutes

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[ODog2323]

I hope Google decides to allow disabling of the encryption without all that hackery at some point soon. Performance questions aside, those battery gains sound like a big deal.

AC App
Nexus 6

 

[vaughaag]

I got myself into a slight boot loop earlier after flashing back to stock I decided to benchmark each step. I know benchmarking is non-comparative and has little meaning in the real world but I think the results show a difference. I ran the benchmark five times and took the best result. AnTuTu is the benchmark app used and each test was carried out after a fresh boot without anything else running.

Fresh 5.0.1 with encryption enabled.


Fresh 5.0.1 unencrypted.


Fresh 5.0.1, unencrypted with Franco Kernel.


and just for a little fun, my iPhone 6+

 

[Lee_Bo]

I pre-ordered two Nexus 6 phones. When they came in, I used NRT to root and decrypt one of them and left the other one stock. Side by side performance was the encrypted one opened some apps a fraction of a second longer than the decrypted one. I didn't really notice any difference in battery performance.