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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

Phone -> USB Cable -> Computer. Transfer images via said cable. Select images, put in email and send to mum.

Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

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> Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.

For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.

I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.

Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.

Sadly, in the new world, we cannot just remove the battery to stop the machine from doing stupid crap.

Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone?

On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.

Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.

On a Nexus 5, sure, it works. Both Mac and PC. Sister's Moto G, same thing.

Once on my Nexus 5 i got an error about copying a folder with lots of contents (some kind of backup i did i think). It forced me to archive it via a file manager on the phone and then transfer that instead. Only happened once though, and on Mac, which needs a standalone app to communicate with the device.

OS X Yosemite, OnePlus One with latest firmware: momental MTP mount and import with Photos app, no failures so far, no cryptic errors.

I use an app called AirDroid (https://www.airdroid.com/) to copy files to/from my Moto G. It works reasonably well in my experience.

I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.

> I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.

Not having to unmount the phone when disconnecting, IIRC.

I looked at that but have you seen the permissions required. Wow. Change my contact list? I'm sure they have good reasons but I'm struggling with that for something I'm going to use for copying files.

While I've gotten MTP to work ok its not a first class experience. Folders with many files (like photos) can take a long time to even start copying. I assumed that MTP was done due avoid patents over FAT32 with Microsoft or something.

It's because you can edit contacts(edit, add, etc) from their web interface.

I use it exclusively to transfer files, much faster then connecting a cable.

The reason they need permission to change your contact list is because Airdroid can change your contact list from your phone.

But isn't Android software and the APIs designed to be extremely modular? This could be solved through a separate app that enables the functionality. Maybe if Google's app store supported this idea more extensively, we could choose the options that an app has access to instead of just trusting they're not going to abuse the privilege.

The fact that the phone can continue to access storage while connected, so apps can get to their data (or apps moved to SD can continue to run).

I can relate to this. I transfer my files via SSH/SFTP when I have to because MTP is just completely unreliable, sometimes it works but most of the time it's just unpredictable.

Samsung Galaxy S4 + Ubuntu. Plug USB, wait up to 2 sec to get folder on desktop + notification, copy files in few more seconds, done.

Or even better: https://syncthing.net/

Many phones make this harder than it needs to be as well... my experience with a Motorola phone I had a few years ago:

Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...

It's still a pain if said device doesn't support USB OTG and you have to deal with MTP.

Sometimes USB isn't an option:

The USB interface on my old Samsung Galaxy S2 broke (seems to be a common problem), now the connection just charges, data transfer is borked under Windows and Linux.

So I thought it would be "easy" to use WLAN for that - Samsung itself wants you to use "Kies", proprietary software which works only under Windows. Once I had located the right old version for my apparently-too-old phone, I started to back up my photos. But Kies decides to be super-duper-slow and downloads with 1 kb/s, so it predicts about 48 hours of copying.

Luckily there's sftp on the play store, with that and scp under Fedora it took 5 minutes.

It's like they want you to hate them.

I used https://www.airdroid.com/ for that; it gives you reasonable, LAN-speed downloads.

Just for file transfers, I really like SuperBeam. It does just one thing, it's really fast (the WiFi direct connection is fantastic) and the PC software is just a file that you run, no installation or other crap necessary.

I'll check it out, thanks! AirDroid is a first good-enough solution I discovered, but it has way more features than I need - you can tweak and manage your mobile device from the web browser in all kind of ways, but the only thing I use is downloading/uploading files.

You can't blame the (quite old) phone for being difficult when one of the main interfaces is broken. And there are many apps that let you explore your phone via wifi instead of using Kies. Just searching "wifi file transfer" or "wifi file manager" gives you plenty of hits.

Are you serious? Because the phone is 5 years old it's reasonable to expect transfer speeds from the 1950's?

No, because the 5 year old phone is broken.

My phone and computer are on the same wireless network, so the cable is a little silly. I use an ftp server on my phone, and my file browser just deals with it like a normal folder. Adverts in the ftp server, though, a little ridiculous.

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