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Android phones show up as MTP devices, which are basically file-level storage instead of block-level storage. Most OS's (besides MacOS) will display this with t

Android phones show up as MTP devices, which are basically file-level storage instead of block-level storage. Most OS's (besides MacOS) will display this with the same interface as a USB mass storage device.

dTal 8y ago
MTP is a horrible protocol which renders the abstraction very leaky in my experience, to the extent that it's inaccurate to refer to it as "removable storage" and expect to behave in similarly sane fashion to a proper flash drive. For example, there's no support for modifying a file in-place - the entire file must be read out, modified, and then written back. These kinds of restrictions render it slow and unreliable. Wikipedia tells the sordid story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#Comparison_with_USB_Mass_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#Compar...
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > MTP is a horrible protocol which renders the abstraction very leaky in my experience Nevertheless, it's still removable storage that can take the place of the most common use case of portable flash drives: moving files around from one computer to another. Which is explicitly what we were originally talking about. Pointing out that it doesn't work for some other use case that you yourself brought up doesn't make any sense. That's not what everyone else was talking about.
  - dTal 8y ago
    I'm not going to debate you in three places at once, that's just obnoxious and clutters the thread. Ultimately this is an argument about the precise semantics of "removable storage". I don't regard an MTP device as "removable storage" - it's another computer that one speaks to using a special protocol, with severe limitations. So is an iPhone - with special, protocol-speaking software, you can certainly put arbitrary files on it. I interpreted the parent to mean that they wanted to plug the phone in to "any PC" and have it Just Work. MTP isn't so great at that, especially from my perspective as a Linux user, where MTP support is no more built-in than iOS-protocol support. From this standpoint, "removable storage" == "USB mass storage". On the other hand, it sounds like whatever Apple provides is much worse even than MTP, and less well supported in general.
    - TulliusCicero 8y ago
      > Ultimately this is an argument about the precise semantics of "removable storage". I don't regard an MTP device as "removable storage" This is absurd. You don't get to tell someone, "you're wrong", then later when it's pointed out that the original assertion was actually true, then say, "oh, I meant that you're wrong as long as we're using my version of the word, the one that's very different from the one everyone else was using." Sorry, but that's blatantly disingenuous. The original context was very clear. If you really meant, "well it sort of works as removable storage in one sense, but not in this other sense" you should've just said that to begin with.
      - dTal 8y ago
        Well, I'm sorry to have upset you, and I hope that the precise technical situation is now clear to anyone reading this thread.
est31 8y ago
MTP is super buggy tho. Sometimes I can get it to work, sometimes I can't. Thought it was the fault of GNU/Linux on the desktop, but I've heard similar stories from Windows users. Most people I've spoken to are just annoyed about MTP. As a possible explanation for this issue, I think that if you use the internet to share data, it's more likely that Google makes money from some of the interactions (either via ads in the app or via play store tax or idk because the service is hosted in GCP or whatever) than if you used an internet-free method, so Google doesn't prioritize bugfixes that would hurt their revenue. Edit: would love to be proven wrong though!

dTal 8y ago

MTP is a horrible protocol which renders the abstraction very leaky in my experience, to the extent that it's inaccurate to refer to it as "removable storage" and expect to behave in similarly sane fashion to a proper flash drive. For example, there's no support for modifying a file in-place - the entire file must be read out, modified, and then written back. These kinds of restrictions render it slow and unreliable. Wikipedia tells the sordid story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#Comparison_with_USB_Mass_Storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#Compar...

TulliusCicero 8y ago
> MTP is a horrible protocol which renders the abstraction very leaky in my experience Nevertheless, it's still removable storage that can take the place of the most common use case of portable flash drives: moving files around from one computer to another. Which is explicitly what we were originally talking about. Pointing out that it doesn't work for some other use case that you yourself brought up doesn't make any sense. That's not what everyone else was talking about.
- dTal 8y ago
  I'm not going to debate you in three places at once, that's just obnoxious and clutters the thread. Ultimately this is an argument about the precise semantics of "removable storage". I don't regard an MTP device as "removable storage" - it's another computer that one speaks to using a special protocol, with severe limitations. So is an iPhone - with special, protocol-speaking software, you can certainly put arbitrary files on it. I interpreted the parent to mean that they wanted to plug the phone in to "any PC" and have it Just Work. MTP isn't so great at that, especially from my perspective as a Linux user, where MTP support is no more built-in than iOS-protocol support. From this standpoint, "removable storage" == "USB mass storage". On the other hand, it sounds like whatever Apple provides is much worse even than MTP, and less well supported in general.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    > Ultimately this is an argument about the precise semantics of "removable storage". I don't regard an MTP device as "removable storage" This is absurd. You don't get to tell someone, "you're wrong", then later when it's pointed out that the original assertion was actually true, then say, "oh, I meant that you're wrong as long as we're using my version of the word, the one that's very different from the one everyone else was using." Sorry, but that's blatantly disingenuous. The original context was very clear. If you really meant, "well it sort of works as removable storage in one sense, but not in this other sense" you should've just said that to begin with.
    - dTal 8y ago
      Well, I'm sorry to have upset you, and I hope that the precise technical situation is now clear to anyone reading this thread.

est31 8y ago

MTP is super buggy tho. Sometimes I can get it to work, sometimes I can't. Thought it was the fault of GNU/Linux on the desktop, but I've heard similar stories from Windows users. Most people I've spoken to are just annoyed about MTP. As a possible explanation for this issue, I think that if you use the internet to share data, it's more likely that Google makes money from some of the interactions (either via ads in the app or via play store tax or idk because the service is hosted in GCP or whatever) than if you used an internet-free method, so Google doesn't prioritize bugfixes that would hurt their revenue. Edit: would love to be proven wrong though!