How to improve performance of Nexus 6 by disabling Forced Encryption

The forced encryption feature has been claimed to be affecting the performance of Google's new Nexus smartphone powered with Android Lollipop. This feature has been present since Android 3.0 Honeycomb, but Android Lollipop is the first OS version in which it is enabled by default.

As AnandTech explains, when forced encryption is enabled, all writes to disk have the information encrypted before it is committed and likewise all reads have the information decrypted before they are returned to the process. This results in significant performance slowdown on Nexus 6.

But Motorola, the manufacturer of Nexus 6, has provided a build of Android to disable the feature. So if your Nexus 6 has become laggy, you can boost the speed of your device by disabling this forced encryption.

Recognised XDA developer, bbedward has shared a couple of stock Android Lollipop builds with no force encrypt as well as a guide explain how to disable the forced encryption on Nexus 6. Check out the following guide to disable the feature and thereby improve the performance of Nexus 6.

Before following the guide, do not forget to create a backup all data of the phone and verify that the phone should have above 80% battery.

IBTimes UK will not be held liable for any damage to the device.

Download links:

Stock LRX22C-No force encrypt

Stock LRX21O- No force encrypt

Stock boot.img- if you want to go back to stock firmware

How to disable forced encryption on Nexus 6

Step-1: Reboot the Nexus 6 into bootloader mode. First power off the Nexus smartphone. Press and hold Volume Down and Power buttons together for a few seconds

Step-2: Unlock the smartphone if you have not already. You can do this by executing the following command in fastboot mode

• fastboot oem unlock

Note: But remember this process will wipe all data of the device.

Step-3: Unlocking the Nexus device will automatically run encryption process, therefore do not boot Android write your most important data down and then continue without backing up the device

Step-4: Download the boot.img noencrypt file from the above download links

Step-5: Flash it in the bootloader by typing in the following data

• fastboot flash boot boot_noforceencrypt.img

Step-6: In order to disable encryption, perform a factory reset (This can be done by fastboot format userdata, in Settings>> Backup & Reset, or in recovery.

Step-7: If the above mentioned procedure does not work, then return to the bootloader mode and flash stock image

Step-8: Run CF-Auto-Root, if you want to root the device and even flash TWRP

Step-9: Updates will overwrite this and turn encryption back. You can update manually or remove the boot.img from update, in case you don't want to turn the encryption on

This process should have successfully disabled the forced encryption features on your Nexus 6.

[Source: XDA]