Encryption is actually slowing Android 5.0 devices down

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.

As alluded to in our Nexus 6 review, our normal storage performance benchmark was no longer giving valid results as of Android 5.0. While Androbench was not a perfect benchmark by any stretch of the imagination, it was a reasonably accurate test of basic storage performance. However, with the Nexus 5 on Android’s developer preview, we saw anywhere between 2-10x improvement to Androbench’s storage performance results with no real basis in reality. It seems that this is because the way that the benchmark was written relied upon another function for timing, which has changed with Android 5.0. While we haven’t talked too much about AndEBench, it has a fully functional storage test that we can compare to our Androbench results. While we’re unsure of the 256K sequential and random read results, it seems that the results are equivalent to Androbench on Android 4.4 when a 1.7x scaling factor is applied. However, AndEBench results should be trustworthy as we saw no difference in results when updating devices from 4.4 to 5.0. In addition, the benchmark itself uses low level operations that shouldn’t be affected by updates to Android.