The latest from Mountain View’s hardware lineup, the Nexus 5X and 6P, have had their fair share of trials since their launch in late October. They’ve been tested for how easily a typical user like you could repair and replace parts, and they’ve been bent out of shape, with varying implications coming out of both. We’ve also seen the now-legendary root expert Chainfire figure a way to get root access without tampering with the /system partition, possibly saving the need to reflash the partition to receive an OTA update. In the line of rooting, something that has caused some grief to the root-loving population that also happened to buy the latest Nexuses is the devices’ default encryption.
If you’re a typical user, you won’t find anything wrong with the great new hardware Google, LG, and Huawei announced a month and a bit ago. The new Nexuses come with Marshmallow, fingerprint readers for another way to unlock them (as well as Android Pay security), updated camera sensors, among many other improvements over the Nexus 6 they follow. But what does device encryption mean for users that prefer to make use of Android’s freedom of modification? Well, it makes things a little problematic.
The Nexus 5X and 6P ship with device encryption set to be on by default. If you don’t want this to be true, you have to fiddle a bit with a new kernel. Chainfire, as mentioned before, was able to come up with modifications and a custom boot image which allowed decryption to be turned off at boot. But some people prefer to have everything stock, or near-stock. Still more prefer an on-off switch-style interface. And that’s what this latest version of Team Win’s Recovery Project brings. The Nexus 6P’s latest build version, number 2.8.7.1, supports Team Win’s full suite of lovely recovery mode tools and features, as well as official device decryption. Sadly, the build for the 5X is not slated to come out until Thursday the 7th of November, but that’s not long, unless you have a 5X and dearly want to decrypt your new hardware and get on with your modifying.