The main backbone of the app is the 'MTP Kernel', as I call it, and it acts as the layer between the app and the device. The MTP protocol in itself is very shabby and it has a lot of inherent issues such as not able to run a task in parallel, frequent connection drop-offs, data corruption etc. OpenMTP was a product resulting from months of research and development. But unfortunately, the user experience with Google's Android File Transfer is appalling."ĭid you run into any particularly difficult problems while creating OpenMTP? Was it difficult to create? I believe that Google decided to just give the bare minimum support so that the Android devices can be accessed across platforms. It took them a while even to make the app compatible with the macOS Catalina since Apple dropped the support for 32bit apps in Catalina. "I am not sure about what's going on at Google, they haven't been updating the app for so long. Why do you think Google hasn't updated Android File Transfer in forever? From the emails and messages that I get, I understood that I was able to make life easier for a lot of people." If I am taking something for free from the community then I have a responsibility to give it back someday and I was sure that many like me were equally frustrated with the Android File Transfer application. "I have been an advocate for Free and Open Source tools for a long time now and I use at least 5 open-source tools each day. Why was it important to make it an open-source project? Then out of frustration, I decided to write an application for macOS." 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. 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: 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. 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. 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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