I'm amazed that Android doesn't have a built in way to connect to a network drive like iOS/iPadOS has
I have a TrueNAS server at home and thought I could easily connect it to my phone (Pixel 7) as a network drive but was surprised to learn that Android doesn’t have a built in feature for that.
iOS/iPadOS does have this to my surprise built in via the ‘Files’ app.
Or did I just not look hard enough in the Android settings? (I know there are 3rd party apps for this)
On the flip side, I’ve been using FX file explorer for this for years with no issues, but my roommate on the latest iPhone (a year ago) encountered a pretty horrific oversight in the default Files app’s way to handle this (and no option to use third party apps).
Whenever she tried to copy more than 2GB from the network drive to the phone via Files, the phone would completely lock up and freeze (and stop transferring, which I confirmed by looking at read operations on the home server). She had to hard reboot and copy the files over multiple operations instead of just queuing up 50GB of audiobooks once and letting it transfer in the background. It turns out the Files app handles network assets by loading them all into RAM and then writing them to the iPhone’s NAND, and if you try to perform an operation that takes more than the phone’s current available RAM it just does the Apple equivalent of a bluescreen.
My Samsung phone does have that feature in the My Files app that comes pre installed. I don’t use it because File Manager+ is so much better. And I have access to my SFTP, LAN and NAS. I am not associated with the app. Just enjoy it and recommend it because I find it very useful.
Which OS do you run? Android just isn’t enough anymore these days.
I 100% agree with this. Different Android “skins” can be so different from one another in look and feel and capabilities I would qualify them as separate Operating Systems which run Android Apps.
Same as with Linux Distros. They all use the same kernel and same low level components like system-d, bash, glibC, … but can offer vastly different capabilites and user experiences.
The stock files app is lacking to say the least. Try Material Files and optionally Round Sync which will allow you to access all rclone supported remotes in the material files app.
I think this is a function that should be delegated to an app, so that users can choose from a variety of options. Having it built in would restrict that choice. Kind of like keyboards.
iOS, as far as I remember, only supports WebDav. Which is useless with an SFTP server, ofc. And yes, there is the solution of installing another file server, configuring it, maintaining it, ripping a new hole into the Firewall, and fiddling around with file permissions, but that sucks, obviously. You could of course buy (or even subscribe to, I believe) a third party, closed sourced, app.
Then there’s Android, with FOSS apps like RemoteFiles, because sideloading.
Or just mount it with rclone.
And in my case, I don’t need an actual mount anyway, because the FOSS Keepass2Android has native SFTP support, because it makes sense to have it.
I think some phone manufacturers do offer a files app, I don’t know which ones have smb capabilities though. Regardless, it is an app, not a part of the OS. Also sounds like that’s how Apple implements it too, except they probably don’t let you use a different app.
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