Accessing files from Android phone on Pi5

I have an ftp server app on my phone, never had any rights issues. There are free ones.

-jw-

On my Android devices (Sony phone and Samsung tablet, both Android 16) the I select "File transfer" rather than "PTP", and I can navigate anywhere. ISTRT the required setting on an earlier device was "MTP".

PTP is a rather more specialized (i.e. limited) protocol and seems to be designed to enable the PC to use the phone as a digital camera -- you'd have to be running something on the PC that understood cameras rather than a general-purpose file manager.

I normally use

As it uses the phone's existing wifi connection it's typically faster than using Bluetooth or USB 2 on the phone.

Theo

I use mtp to talk to my phone. No issues

I have termux on my phone, which lets you use ssh to log in to the phone from your laptop, and also lets you use scp to transfer files back and forth.

termux' sshd is not run by default, but you can either run it from the termux window or you could put a call to it in the shell's init file.

I find it much nicer to ssh in and cd around than to hunt using a gui file manager, but YMMV.

Jim

If none of the other options suggested so far by others work, if your phone runs Android you might be able to use the Android Debug Bridge (adb). It takes a bunch of key presses to enable USB debug access on the phone--and disable it when finished--but it does provide non-root access to the phone's file tree.

Yeah, I’m just using adb. I have decided not to configure a Google account into my less-than-a-year-old 4G phone.

You can use it to move files in both directions (e.g. upload books to read while waiting at the dentist’s office etc). (Tip: use “adb pull

-a” to preserve timestamps when retrieving files.) You can even save .apk files from the Android device back to your host machine. The directory where they’re kept has execute-only access for some reason, but there is a separate adb function for listing what they are anyway.

I thought PTP was the earlier protocol, while MTP was the later generalization:

PTP -- transfer only pictures MTP -- “M” for media -- transfer other stuff, not just pictures

Yes, indeed.

I don't think that contradicts what I wrote. PTP was the earlier protocol, specifically for cameras, which was later generalized to support full file transfer as a replacement for USB mass-storage.

Sorry for any confusion.

Indeed. Even nicer is using sshfs to mount the phones files into your own work space on a the pi or, e.g. on my linux desktop.

I didnt know that,

NP