Many of those that buy Nexus devices, like to throw on a custom recovery and tinker away with their new device. And that’s what the Nexus is for really, as it is a developer smartphone. Google makes it easy to unlock the bootloader, root and throw on a custom ROM. Now the Nexus 6P has a TWRP build ready. So as soon as you get your Nexus 6P, if you haven’t already, you can flash a custom recovery. While the Nexus 6P does have TWRP available, it doesn’t have the ability to decrypt your data just yet. That’s something that Nexus 5X users are dealing with as well right now.
As most of you know, both the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P come encrypted. Now this is obviously to keep your data safe. So you might wonder why anyone would want to reverse that. And that’s due to the performance that encrypted data affects. As you could see in our speed tests we did with the Nexus 6P, it’s a bit slower because of data being encrypted. Even from the moment you boot up the device. As usual with security features, there are some trade-offs here.
While you currently can’t reverse the encryption, developers are working on it and do have it on their roadmap. So it likely won’t be long before there’s a way to decrypt the data on your smartphone, and really unleash the beast, that is the Nexus 6P. With a custom recovery, you’ll be able to start flashing some ROMs. Which is great because Nexus devices have historically had the most custom ROMs available, and I’d expect the same for the Nexus 6P. Luckily, Google has posted the factory image for the Nexus 6P (as well as the Nexus 5X) so if you mess anything up, you can easily flash the factory image and have a working smartphone again.
The Nexus 6P is currently shipping, however the 128GB models are a bit behind. But those should start shipping out soon. The Nexus 6P is available from the Google Store as well as Huawei’s own website here in the US.