The New Hotness

For reasons undoubtedly making sense at the time, the Google Pixel (and, most likely, current Android devices) don’t support the USB Mass Storage protocol. A bit of poking around suggests the jmtpfs utility supplies the other end of the Pixel’s Media Transfer Protocol and the process goes a little something like this:

• Once upon a time, create a mountpoint: mkdir /mnt/pixel
• Unlock the phone
• Plug in the USB cable
• Pull down the top menu, tap USB charging this device
• Select Transfer Files
• sudo jmtpfs /mnt/pixel -o allow_other,fsname="Pixel"

The allow_other parameter sets the directory / file permissions so ordinary users can access the files. The fsname is just for pretty.

The Pixel’s storage then appears as the awkwardly named /mnt/pixel/Internal\ shared\ storage/ directory.

Despite being somewhat Linuxy under the hood, the mapped storage doesn’t support the usual filesystem attributes, so don’t try to transfer them with, say, rsync -a:

rsync -rhu --progress /mnt/music/Music\ for\ Programming /mnt/pixel/Internal\ shared\ storage/Music/

When you’re done: sudo umount /mnt/pixel

This may not be a win over bankshotting off Dropbox or Google Drive, except for sensitive bits like private keys and suchlike.

Thunar apparently knows how to detect and mount mtp devices automagically and I suppose GUI-fied drag-n-drop works as you’d expect.