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. 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.
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Update ( 2:09 PM ET): We've updated the story to include some responses to questions we sent Rathinavel via email.