Connects an Android phone to a Mac.
Plug the phone into your Mac and open Android Bridge: its storage shows up as an ordinary disk, in a window you already know how to use. Drag files in, drag files out, move things around on the phone itself. You are never asked to care about MTP, USB or ADB.
v0.15.4 · 11.6 MB · macOS 11+ · Apple Silicon and Intel
Every storage area gets a sidebar entry with a capacity meter. Folders open in tabs, as a list, a grid of thumbnails, or columns. A camera roll of a thousand photos scrolls without stalling.
Drag from Finder to copy files or whole folders onto the phone, structure intact. Drag one out of the window to copy it off. Nothing is overwritten without asking first.
Files move between folders, and between storage areas, without a round trip through the Mac. A move that stops partway resumes where it left off.
Checksum verification reads each file back off the phone and compares it by SHA-256. Every transfer says how many files, how much, and how long it took.
Four steps, and two of them happen on the phone rather than the Mac.
Open the downloaded .dmg and drag Android Bridge onto the Applications folder beside it. Eject the disk image afterwards.
The first open needs one extra step, because the app is not signed by Apple. It is the next section, and it happens once per version.
A good USB-C data cable, preferably under a metre. Long or cheap ones drop transfers partway, and charge-only cables carry no data at all, which looks exactly like a broken app.
Pull down the notification shade and tap the USB notification. Android starts in charging mode, which shares nothing, so most phones need this every time.
That is the whole install. No installer, no helper tool, no login item, and nothing running when the app is closed. Removing it is the same in reverse: drag the app to the Bin. It leaves nothing behind unless you turned on persistent logging, which lives in one folder you can delete.
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.android-bridge.macos
Signing an app requires a paid Apple Developer account. This one is free, has no revenue behind it, and ships unsigned, so macOS refuses the first open, usually with the message "Android Bridge is damaged and can't be opened". It is not damaged. That is what macOS says about software it cannot check with Apple, which is a fair thing to want checked. Either route below clears it for good, and under them is what you can verify in Apple's place.
Try to open the app once and dismiss the warning. In System Settings, under Privacy & Security, macOS lists the app it just blocked with a button to open it anyway. On older versions, right-click the app in Applications and choose Open.
Works on every version of macOS.
$ xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Android Bridge.app"
No telemetry, no update check, and nothing to phone home with. It talks to your phone over USB and to nothing else. Logging is off by default, and an exported log can have file names replaced by short digests, so sharing one does not list what you own.
Compare it against the file you got, and you know the two are the same bytes.
$ shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Android-Bridge-0.15.4.dmg
sha-256
143c190d1aa357070907547f34a00e157071560a96128bc64a950a9d83f2ec07
Only one app at a time can talk to a phone over USB, and several claim that connection the moment a phone is plugged in. When one of them wins, the phone vanishes partway through, exactly as though the cable had been pulled out. Three things to check.
Uninstalled, not closed. Google's app installs a background agent that starts itself whenever a phone is plugged in. Quit it in Activity Monitor, including Android File Transfer Agent, drag the app to the Bin, then clear any leftover entry in System Settings, General, Login Items.
Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Preview let go as soon as they are closed, so quit them while you transfer. Samsung Smart Switch and LG Kies install the same kind of always-on agent as Google's app and need the same treatment.
A long or poor-quality cable drops a transfer the same way an app does. Use a good USB-C data cable under a metre, and keep the two-metre one for charging.
A new version means coming back to this page and downloading it again. The app never checks for one on its own, because it never opens a connection at all.
They differ from one another more than they should, so an unfamiliar one can still turn up something new. The app's own log is the place to start when it does.
No paid tier, no account, no trial that expires. The source is not public; the licences of everything it is built on are listed inside the app under Acknowledgements.
v0.15.4 · 11.6 MB · macOS 11+ · Apple Silicon and Intel