OS interconnectivity question: Mac to Android

Factual Questions
1

My daughter contacted me from college and asked me to send her a replacement adapter for her micro-SD card in her phone, so she can upload content from it to her computer. I sent her a card reader that will accommodate that function, but the is now on its way back to me with “undeliverable as addressed” on it.

Grrr. :mad:

Anyway, while she waits for me to start this process over again, I thought maybe she could connect to her MacBook Air via a USB cable. She told me that the Mac operating system is not compatible with her Android phone.

Can anyone point me to a utility that she can load onto her MacBook that will permit it to interface with her Android phone? Alternatively, is there a (preferably free) application that she can put onto her Galaxy S3 that will permit THAT to interface with her Mac OS?

TIA.

2

Will either of these solutions work? I’d try on my wife’s phone, but she’s at work.

3

I use AirDroid. Start the app on the android device and then connect to it through the laptop’s browser to up/down load files.

4

Isn’t this one of the Android phone selling points? That, unlike an iPhone, it will appear as a regular USB volume when you plug it into (any) computer.

5

That’s what my Google Nexus 5 does. Just copy and paste files.

6

Mac to Android? Is that… even legal?

(Seriously, I’d expect it to be one of the most difficult platform pairs to match up, even for simple file transfer. After all, I returned my gen-1 iPhone after two hours because Apple had flat-out lied about Windows connectivity. And they only begrudge Windows, not hate it with a white-hot fury that persists beyond the grave…)

7

I use Android File Transfer (the second one in the linked article). My cheap StraightTalk phone doesn’t support bluetooth file transfers. I don’t know why OSX doesn’t recognize it as an external drive, but it doesn’t.

Android File Transfer opens automatically when I plug my phone in.

8

Here, let me GIFY.

9

Thanks much, all. I’ve bookmarked the thread to facebook and shared it to her timeline.

10

it’s a bit complicated in that some Android phones present to a host OS as “USB Mass Storage” which means Android has to un-mount its storage volume in order for the connected PC/Mac to be able to mount it. Which means anything stored on the internal flash or SD card will be unavailable to Android until you unplug the handset from the computer.

Newer ones like the Nexus 5 I had will present as “MTP” devices (Media Transfer Protocol) so they don’t have to un-mount their internal storage. I think this behavior can be changed so it’ll depend on what Samsung chose to do on that phone.

11

Well, that doesn’t sound too promising. In the event that this is the case for her S3, do the suggestions given upthread constitute a workaround?

12

I’d second AirDroid, assuming both devices are on the same network.

13

Just have her plug the USB cord into her Mac, it won’t hurt anything and probably will just come up as a browsable drive much like a flash drive would. The Android might pop up a message asking whether it should do “USB Mass Storage” or “Charge Only”, in this case she’d want to pick USB Mass Storage.