What software would I use which would enable me to plug my Sony phone into my Mac, and see the content, of my phone?

By Natalia Voegele, 19 October, 2018

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hello,

I love my Mac and use it, with VoiceOver, as much as possible and I've been an Android user for years. Is there any software that will allow me to plug my Sony phone into my Mac, which will allow me to see the contents of my phone? Sometimes, I need to look at something on my SD card or add or remove files from my phone, and I don't want to always have to do it from Windows. I've tried a few things, such as AirDroid, but it's not accessible with VoiceOver.
Thank you for any help you can provide,
Natalia

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Comments

By That Blind Canuck on Monday, November 5, 2018 - 06:38

Well, if I were to guess, if your Sony phone is seen as a removable drive on your Windows machine, then the same should be true on a Mac. Your Mac should just see your Sony phone as it does an external hard drive or USB key, as a removable drive.

By Chris on Monday, November 5, 2018 - 06:38

You cannot simply plug your Android device into macOS and have it show up as a removable drive. Android switched to MTP somewhere around 4.0 Icecream Sandwich and dropped the old mass storage mode of transferring data. Apple doesn't support mounting MTP drives directly to the Finder. We can spend all day speculating why this is, but I suspect the primary reason is that they don't want to give you access to the competing platform on their platform. They would rather you use iTunes and iOS with macOS. Doesn't that seem just a little bit egotistical? Well, that's just one of the many arrogant and monopolistic policies Apple is known for which really irritates me.

If you want to connect via USB, you can try using Android File Transfer. Download it from https://dl.google.com/dl/androidjumper/mtp/current/AndroidFileTransfer.dmg
From my brief time using the app, I have discovered that you have to drag and drop content into the window for it to transfer to your device. I couldn't get it to work properly most of thetime, but give it a shot. Aside from this, your only other option may be finding an Android app that turns your device into an SMB share. Connect to the SMB share over the network on your Mac and you should be able to access the emulated and real SD card partitions on your device with full read and write access. Sadly, I don't know of any good apps for this purpose and cannot investigate as my Nexus 7 tablet broke last year and I haven't bought another Android device as of yet.