> Upon boot, the user must provide their credentials before any part of the disk is accessible.
> While this is great for security, it means that most of the core functionality of the phone is not immediately available when users reboot their device. Because access to their data is protected behind their single user credential, features like alarms could not operate, accessibility services were unavailable, and phones could not receive calls.
I'm sure they could have found a better approach, instead of file based encryption, but must have been nice to simplify engineering overhead and giving 3 letter agencies, at the same time, something that simplifies their work.
Their justification here https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/encryption is that
> Upon boot, the user must provide their credentials before any part of the disk is accessible.
> While this is great for security, it means that most of the core functionality of the phone is not immediately available when users reboot their device. Because access to their data is protected behind their single user credential, features like alarms could not operate, accessibility services were unavailable, and phones could not receive calls.
I'm sure they could have found a better approach, instead of file based encryption, but must have been nice to simplify engineering overhead and giving 3 letter agencies, at the same time, something that simplifies their work.