As you might have heard, Android 5.0 will see encryption enabled by default on Android phones. Prior to this, Google made encryption an option on Android devices, but with the recent Snowden reports and government surveillance, Google decided that the best way to go about it was to enable the feature by default.
Safe to say this did not make law enforcement officials happy and it seems that it could potentially hamper the performance of Google’s devices as well. While our own review of the Nexus 6 found that it performed incredibly well, the folks at AnandTech tell a different story. The benchmark they ran was meant to test storage read/write speed.
According to their findings, it seems that the Nexus 6 with the encryption on performed much slower compared to the Nexus 6 with its encryption off. In fact the Nexus 5 with KitKat and Lollipop both outperformed the Nexus 6 with encryption enabled, as you can see in the benchmark results above.
Now how does this affect you? Well unless you work with a lot of data, chances are you might not notice any differences in performance. However if you’re the type that loves min/maxing then you can always disable encryption where the instructions on how to do that can be found on the XDA forums. Will this be an issue that Google will address? Well it’s hard to say, but hopefully with this information made public, Google will find a way to optimize performance while maintaining encryption at the same time.