Is it easy to remove encryption's password prompt on boot if I don't want it anymore?

Question

As discussed here, there are some notable benefits to phone encryption, so I'm about to try it for the first time. Before doing it:

1. will I be able to remove the password / lock in the future, after encryption? or will it to be mandatory to have to enter a password on phone boot? I.e. if I don't want any protection anymore, will there always be a password prompt on boot or can I disable this? (btw: I read that totally disabling encryption needs a full format / factory reset)

2. have you noticed a lower performance after encryption, on everyday use (browsing, basic apps, etc.)?

I have a Samsung a3 2015 with android 5.0.2.

Answer 1

It's not quite easy, but rather complicated to remove encryption depending on how much data you have on your phone.

Removing encryption, AFAIK, requires formatting /data partition. So all you have to do is

• Copy out all personal files from internal storage (assume you have a shared storage)
• Make a backup, if you want to continue using the phone ASAP
• Format /data
• Copy everything back
• Restore from backup

The encryption removal itself is, rather fast (a few seconds). The only complication is backup & restore.

Performance issues:

The encryption is done at real-time, so whenever an app wants to read or write data, enc/dec is done before reading from/after writing to disk. This, however, does not have a great impact on CPU. I haven't noticed a great performance degradation with encryption (with my OnePlus 5), so I believe it's safe to have encryption enabled without worrying about performance issues on modern phones. It has always been complained about by Nexus 6 users. You'd better stay away from it if you're using a phone with eMMC storage and a non-flagship SoC.