10
exerceo
2y

MTP is complete garbage. I want mass storage back.

The media transfer protocol (MTP) occasionally discovers new creative ways of failure. Frequently, directory listings take minutes to load or fail to load at all, and it freezes up infinitely (until disconnected) when renaming an item, and I can not even do two things simultaneously.

While files are being moved, I can not browse pictures or watch videos from the smartphone.

Sometimes, files are listed with the date 1970-01-01 (Unix epoch) instead of their correct date. Sometimes, files do not appear at all, which makes it unsafe to move directories from the device.

MTP lacks random access. If I want to play a two-gigabyte 4K 2160p video and seek in the video, guess what: I need to copy it to my computer's local mass storage first because MTP lacks random access.

When transferring high numbers of files, MTP has to slooooowly enumerate (or "prepare" or "calculate the time of") them all, which might even take longer than mass storage would need for the entire process. This means MTP might start copying or moving the actual files when mass storage is already finished.

Today, the "preparing to move" process was especially slow: five minutes for around 150 files! How am I supposed to find out what caused this random malfunction?

MTP sometimes drives me insane. I want mass storage back, at least for the MicroSD memory card, which uses a widely supported file system.

Imagine a 2010 $100 Android phone is better at file transfer than a 2022 $1000 Android phone (or iPhone, for that matter).

Comments
  • 2
    I believe the reasons they removed it are valid, but that's no excuse why MTP performance and stability sucks so hard. You must be a masochist if a USB cable is what you transfer files with. Luckily, there are good alternative interfaces once you set them up.
  • 0
    @electrineer Indeed, FTP is much more stable and also supports parallelism. Sadly, the days of browsing my smartphone through FTP through the web browser are over.

    https://devrant.com/rants/5806763/...
  • 1
    I use Xplore wifi file sharing & with USB tethering. It gives a nice ui, easy to drag and drop files, & so much more.
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