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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

If you had RTFA, you'd know that by "get along" the author really meant, share/synchronize data between your Android device and PC.

TL;DR Before Android 3.0, you could just plug your device in and use USB Mass Storage. After Android 3.0, to share data with your Linux PC, you have to install MTP protocol or use a cloud storage service like dropbox.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/how-to-connect-your-andro...

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That using multiple computers that you own together in a coherent manner without needing weird 3rd party software and services is still an issue for regular people is one of the things that tells me that we are not living in the best possible world of tech.

I don't really see any reason why some of the higher level concepts from Plan 9 that solved this problem should not have take off by now. Alas that is not the case.

I wasnt aware of this android 'feature' since I am still stuck on android 2.3 on my Verizon Droid Charge. Interestingly I always pointed out the fact that you could just plug in an android device as a usb mass storage as the example of how google gets it. Not looking forward to my phone upgrade now. Also I dont know if it was a broken implementation but using MTP on the Creative Zii devkit was an exercise in frustration.

Andoroid 4.1 supports USB mass storage, at least on the devices I've used. I think it does have to be enabled in the settings though.

Android 4.x supports it, but I think the phone hardware has to also support it somehow. As far as I know there is no way to get a galaxy nexus or a nexus 7 into usb mass storage mode.

Mass storage doesn't work on a device like the Galaxy Nexus that emulates the "SD card" on its internal storage, because it requires making the blocks of the underlying device available to the host OS.

IMO it's worth it to avoid that awful old chestnut where you'd run out of internal space with heaps left on the card, but unfortunately MTP isn't quite as convenient :(

The issue is that new devices don't have filesystems that can be exported over USB mass storage. Instead of having a small data partition and big FAT32 external storage partition, they have a single bigger data partition with a media storage directory.

The data partition is ext4, so can't be mounted by most operating systems. It is also shared between apps, app data, and media storage so it can't be exported while in use.

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