Native MTP interconnect on Mac/Linux

Connecting your phone to your computer via MTP isn’t as easy as it should be: the Android File Transfer app is very lackluster and I wanted to have native file manager integration so that my phone would show up in either Nautilus on Debian or Finder on Mac. Here’s how I got it working.

Linux setup

On Debian (or Debian derivatives like Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev android-tools-adb

Mac setup

Install Homebrew (http://brew.sh) and OSXFuse (https://osxfuse.github.io/) then run:

brew update
brew install android-platform-tools

Clone, build, and setup adbfs

We’ll be using adbfs to mount our Android phone:

git clone git://github.com/spion/adbfs-rootless.git
cd adbfs-rootless    
make

Create a mount point

mkdir ~/phone

Mount device as follows:

./adbfs ~/phone

And your phone should be mounted and visible the same way as any DAS device (e.g. External drives).

Troubleshooting

Try reseting and restarting adb and the mount point

killall -9 adb; sudo umount -f ~/phone