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- #BEST ANDROID FILE TRANSFER FOR MAC FOR FREE#
- #BEST ANDROID FILE TRANSFER FOR MAC INSTALL#
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I still remember those days when I had to use a FTP client to transfer files from macOS to Android. The experience with Google's official AFT was horrible and the other available applications were either too expensive or were too slow. "When I bought a new Macbook, I was pretty shocked to see that Apple didn't have the support for reading a MTP device, which is a pretty basic thing in the other OSes. I asked Rathinavel a few questions about the app, and here are his responses, which are lightly edited for clarity: And, as it turns out, it wasn't a slam dunk from the beginning. Those issues aside, OpenMTP works way better than any solo open-source project should.
#BEST ANDROID FILE TRANSFER FOR MAC FOR FREE#
Also - and this is quite the nitpick for free open-source software - holding shift to select a large number of files in succession does not work as you'd expect it to. Critically, large transfers do work and the speeds were good, hovering above 30 megabytes per second. My OnePlus 8 Pro basically wouldn't work at all, and though the Xiaomi appeared to work fine, it would time out as soon as the screen turned off after 60 seconds. I do have some details to share from my tests with the app:
#BEST ANDROID FILE TRANSFER FOR MAC INSTALL#
Then install OpenMTP the way you would any other Mac app, and open it. Here’s how the app works: First uninstall AFT as mentioned above, and maybe reboot just for good measure since this is a driver we’re talking about. This open source utility is the work of Ganesh Rathinavel, an Indian software developer who is now an international hero. Luckily I was able to experience the joy of moving it directly to my Mac’s trash can, where it belongs, because there’s a new sheriff town: OpenMTP. Oh, and it also interferes with some other Android interface software, meaning that if you need to do some hacking (as Android users are wont to do), the reason it’s not working is probably because AFT is messing it up.Īs you can probably infer by my tone, I have a lot of, uh, experience with AFT. It glitches out if you have too many files in a directory, it glitches out if the transfer is too large, it glitches out if you look at it the wrong way. The important thing to understand for the non-Android, non-Mac users out there, is that Android File Transfer (AFT) works like shit.
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Google has only updated the app three times, ever, to keep it working with newer versions of macOS. See, when Android phones transitioned from connecting to computers via “mass storage,” where the phone just looks like a drive, to MTP, Google made this work with a utility called Android File Transfer. You would think that Google, the company behind the ascension of Android, would have an interest in making it easy to use an Android phone with a Mac, and you’d be wrong. Apple, nearly a decade later, is still too petty to natively support MTP, Android’s file transfer protocol. If you have a Mac and an Android device, you know that transferring files between them is a total nightmare.
#BEST ANDROID FILE TRANSFER FOR MAC UPDATE#
Update ( 2:09 PM ET): We've updated the story to include some responses to questions we sent Rathinavel via email.
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