How to Connect MTP Devices on macOS

by Rian

Media Transfer Protocol, or MTP, is something Microsoft came up with in the days of PMPs and PMCs. If the history teaches us anything, it is that most of the remnants from MP3 eras were fragmented and chaotic patchwork of technologies to make that one proof of concept to just barely work.

The significance of Microsoft’s involvement for macOS and Linux comes largely from the fact that Android devoices —not just smartphones, but anything that has “smart” in it— likely connect to computers using MTP, a protocol that may or may not work off. On Mac, there are at least 3 ways to connect MTP devices:

1. Google’s Android File Transfer.
2. Open source OpenMTP
3. HyperIntegrate’s MTP for Mac
   

On a personal note, I recommend OpenMTP. Going through the list, neither the Android File Transfer nor Mtp for Mac have seen much update recently. Google seems to have largely abandoned its Android File Transfer since 2018. And, MTP for Mac, a beta app, is riddled with documentations from Big Sur era and still doesn’t fully support ARM (experimental version is provided). My personal experience with both apps was that Google’s was simply outdated, whereas HyperIntegrate can be hit-and-miss.