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