Google’s Android 5.0 Lollipop has many, many improvements compared with older versions of Android from the interface, performance and battery life. These improvements include encrypting the device so that without the correct password or PIN, it is significantly harder for a thief (or the Government) to break into the device and making it easier to unlock the device, so as to encourage people to set a password. These improvements will help Google to sell the device into the corporate market, but unfortunately these improvements are not without their teething problems. These issues include how Google’s full disk encryption significantly slows memory access on the Google Nexus 6. We now have reports of another issue whereby the device will not connect to Cisco WiFi access points running WPA2 with AES encryption. This is a very popular WiFi configuration for big business and unfortunately the bug stops the device from connecting to that access point: after inputting the connection settings, the device promptly saves that WiFi settings but does not connect. It appears that the WiFi setup corrupts the connection manager as devices that already have the corporate access point working fine before the update, continue to connect after the over-the-air update. However, factory resetting the device after the update removes the ability to reconnect to the same access point.
It gets worse: the WiFi connection bug was introduced with the second pre-release of Android 5.0 Lollipop and had already been reported before the official release into Google’s official support forums. Understandably, this is more than a little frustrating for users, especially those with WiFi-only devices such as the Nexus 9. And whilst there are some workaround, the most effective involves root access, which isn’t necessarily something neither I nor my employer would expect to see in the corporate environment! For most users, there is little that we can do until Google releases a fix and updates Android Lollipop to 5.0.1.
It’s not unusual for brand new versions of an operating system to come with bugs, even those that have already been reported during the pre-release. Let’s hope that this update is quickly quashed. Meanwhile, how many of our readers are trying to use their Nexus device in a corporate environment and are suffering from the bug? Let us know in the comments below.