AndroidFT

A native Apple Silicon replacement for Google's abandoned Android File Transfer.
Plug in your phone, drag files both ways. No Rosetta, no Agent, no ads.

Why

Google's Android File Transfer is an Intel-only app from 2018. On an Apple Silicon Mac it runs under Rosetta, installs a login-item "Agent" that grabs your phone's USB port the moment you plug it in, and Google stopped maintaining it. The macOS Finder cannot talk to MTP devices at all.

AndroidFT is the same job done properly: a SwiftUI app, built for arm64, talking to the phone over libmtp. The original's behaviour was recovered by decompiling it with REA and Ghidra before writing a line of Swift, so the quirks that made it work on real phones are kept (see re/NOTES.md).

Features

• Browse every storage on the phone (internal, SD card) with a Finder-style table: name, last modified, size, sortable columns.
• Drag and drop files and folders from Finder onto the window to copy them to the phone, and drag items out of the window to copy them to your Mac. Toolbar buttons do the same through open panels.
• Manage: new folder, rename, delete (with confirmation, recursive for folders).
• Hot-plug: the app watches USB through IOKit and connects the moment the phone is plugged in or switched to File transfer mode. No background agent, nothing at login.
• Progress sheet with bytes copied and time remaining; cancel at any time.
• Replace / Replace All / Skip when a name already exists, the way the original did it.
• Error messages tell you what to actually do (unlock the phone, pick File transfer on the USB notification).

Install

Homebrew

brew tap rajpdus/tap
brew trust rajpdus/tap        # Homebrew 7 asks you to trust third-party taps once
brew install --cask androidft

The cask removes the quarantine attribute after install because the app is signed ad hoc, not with an Apple Developer ID; otherwise macOS Gatekeeper would refuse to open it. Upgrade with brew upgrade --cask androidft.

Download

Grab AndroidFT-<version>.zip from the latest release, unzip, move AndroidFT.app to /Applications, then run the xattr command above once.

Requirements

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon.
• A phone in File transfer / Android Auto USB mode (the notification that appears when you plug it in). Charging-only mode exposes nothing.
• If Google's Android File Transfer is installed, quit it and remove Android File Transfer Agent from System Settings → General → Login Items. The Agent claims the phone's USB interface and blocks every other MTP client.

Use

1. Plug the phone in and unlock it. Choose File transfer on the phone's USB notification.
2. AndroidFT opens the first storage. Use the sidebar button (⌘⌃S) to switch between internal storage and an SD card.
3. Double-click folders to enter them. ⌘[ / ⌘] go back and forward, ⌘↑ goes to the enclosing folder.
4. Drag files in or out. Or select items and use Copy to Mac / Copy to Device in the toolbar.
5. ⇧⌘N makes a folder, ⌘⌫ deletes the selection, right-click for rename.

Files cannot be opened in place: MTP is not a file system. Copy them to the Mac first, as the original app also required.

How it works

SwiftUI views ── AppModel (navigation, transfers, conflict prompts)
                    │
                    ├── MTPSession     one serial queue around libmtp:
                    │                  detect, open, storages, list, get, send,
                    │                  create folder, delete, rename
                    └── DeviceWatcher  IOKit IOUSBHostDevice notifications, 1 s debounce
                                       │
                               libmtp 1.1.23 ── libusb 1.0 ── USB ── phone (MTP/PTP)

The release build bundles libmtp and libusb inside AndroidFT.app/Contents/Frameworks, so nothing else needs to be installed. Development builds link the Homebrew copies.

Reverse engineering the original

The original app is a thin Cocoa UI over a C++ MTPRepository class and a Google-patched libmtp. Its Objective-C class map, the decompiled device-open sequence (uncached open, the Samsung retry, the 20 s timeout), the per-storage path cache, the transfer and progress contract, and the login-item Agent's IOKit hot-plug logic are written up in re/NOTES.md. The analysis used REA's inspect-macho, inspect-native-dispatch-metadata, decode-interface-builder and Ghidra-backed function commands; the wrapper script re/rea.sh reproduces the environment.

Build from source

brew install libmtp
git clone https://github.com/rajpdus/androidft.git
cd androidft
swift build                 # debug binary in .build/debug/AndroidFT
./scripts/bundle.sh         # build/AndroidFT.app with libmtp/libusb embedded

swift test runs an end-to-end test against an attached phone: it creates a scratch folder at the storage root, uploads 1 MiB of random data, lists it, downloads it back and compares bytes, renames it and deletes the folder. The test skips when no MTP device is attached.

Releasing

1. scripts/release.sh 0.2.0 stamps the version into scripts/Info.plist; commit it.
2. git tag v0.2.0 && git push origin main v0.2.0. GitHub Actions builds the bundle on an Apple Silicon runner and publishes AndroidFT-0.2.0.zip and SHA256SUMS.txt to the release. The CI zip is the canonical artifact; a local build will not have the same checksum.
3. scripts/update-cask.sh 0.2.0 <sha256 from SHA256SUMS.txt> > ../homebrew-tap/Casks/androidft.rb, then brew style and brew audit --cask --online rajpdus/tap/androidft in the tap, commit and push.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause / fix
"No Android device found"	Phone not in File transfer mode, cable is charge-only, or the phone is still locked.
"Can't access device storage"	Phone is locked, or USB mode is Charging only. The app retries every 3 s.
Console shows libusb_claim_interface() = -3	Another process holds the device: Google's Android File Transfer (and its Agent), Android Studio, adb with MTP, or a second copy of AndroidFT. Quit it and press Refresh.
App refuses to open after download	Gatekeeper and the ad-hoc signature. See Install.
Cancel keeps copying for a while	Cancel finishes the file in flight, then stops. Aborting mid-file leaves the phone's MTP service stuck until you re-plug it, so the app never does that.
Every operation fails after an aborted transfer (another app, a crash)	The phone's MTP service is stuck. Unplug the cable and plug it back in; the app reconnects by itself.
Copy of a 4 GB+ file fails	Some phones format their shared storage as FAT32. Split the file or use a phone with exFAT/ext4.

License

MIT. Bundled libmtp and libusb are LGPL-2.1; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Android is a trademark of Google LLC; this project is not affiliated with Google.