Just a day after Amazon quietly removed device encryption from Fire OS version 5, the company has reversed course and decided to finally put encryption on Fire OS.
However, if you were expecting an immediate fix, you're out of luck, as the encryption update won't come for at least two weeks.
"We will return to full disk encryption with an update to Fire OS coming this spring," an Amazon spokesperson told Mashable on Saturday.
Rumors of the encryption first surfaced earlier this year after a user pointed out the change in February on an Amazon customer forum. The changes affect Amazon devices including the Fire Phone, Amazon Fire HD, and Kindle Fire tablets.
This subtle change by Amazon meant that users with devices running Fire OS 5, the company's latest generation of mobile operating system, no longer had encryption support, while users of devices still running Fire OS 4 still had encryption enabled.
Amazon's recent encryption tweaks are not directly related to Apple with the FBI over the iPhone. But the series of events involving Apple has increased the level of scrutiny for all consumer technology companies that have been charged with protecting consumer privacy in the face of government security concerns.
Amazon's reasoning for removing encryption is supposedly related to the fact that few customers use it. "In the fall, when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we saw customers weren't using," Amazon told Mashable on Friday.
However, the immediate outcry from Fire OS users on social media criticizing Amazon's initial decision indicates that the issue of encryption is more important to users than Amazon may have guessed.
Finally, it's worth noting that no specific date has been announced for the return of encryption to Fire OS.
