Android phones don't do this anymore, for the technical reason that allowing a computer to mount a filesystem directly requires that the phone unmount it. Mass storage expects a block device, so there's no wrapper that one could provide that would make this work with the native filesystems of the phone.

What could be done is to dedicate a file on the phone as block storage, and expose that as a mass storage device. This would suffer from the same problem (of the phone not being able to access it at the same time), but if it's dedicated "flash drive emulation" space then perhaps this behavior won't be as surprising to the user.

Argh! I just went through this with a friend's iPhone when he asked spur of the moment to have a video on his iPhone displayed on some monitors for a presentation. The monitors are driven by a Win10 computer. My first thought was to transfer the file from the iPhone with Bluetooth to the computer, but apparently an iPhone can't be paired in that manner. So lame. The video was too big to email, so I used send.firefox.com and uploaded the video to it, and then downloaded the video to the computer. Thanks to the iPhone's protective wall that little stunt cost my friend 200MB of cellular data. The computer didn't have iTunes, and there was no Lightning cable available so direct hardwired transfer wasn't an option either.

> Nah, Android phones have done this forever

Your only option today is MTP on Android, and it stinks.

At one time, Android did support showing up as a mass storage device. I know when I first got a G1, then the phone I had after that - both you could plug in, and they appeared as a mass storage device. Just like a USB thumb drive.

I don't recall if you could use the file system at the same time on both sides; I doubt it, though. This was never a problem for me. It just worked - just like a thumb drive.

Then something changed; I don't recall which Android version, but they gradually phased out the phone appearing as a USB drive, and started to phase in MTP. I recall MTP being absolute POS on Linux, barely workable everywhere else, and where it did work, it was slow.

It's gotten better over the years on all platforms, but it still isn't anything like it should be.

My theory on why they switched was to keep people from easily side-loading APKs, and backing them up easily, etc. I think it was all part of the battle to keep people from really owning their phones, keep them from rooting them, etc. The ever and ongoing battle in which nobody really wins, everything is left as rubble, and the results are futile, because if they lock things down completely, the people that want things open will just leave to create their own devices, and they don't really gain much.

As an aside - that's a direction I've been thinking about pursuing. There are now some relatively cheap 4G modules out there, and some open-source "phone" operating systems for the Raspberry Pi and other embedded controllers (with varying levels of "working-ness"). I'm just getting tired of not really owning my own phone, and I want to do something about it.

My current phone is an S7 (TMobile version) - and they've made it hard as heck to actually root; it seems like every time they come out with a way to do it, Samsung/T-Mobile updates to prevent it. I'm just tired of the whole cat-mouse thing; I want things completely open, even if it means I have to write my own apps.

Android and iOS user. I"m not defending it per say because the frustration of a real shell existing (I've jailbroken iOS and used it) but no access to it is real.

The argument from apple is even if you put a warning label on on a setting "allow filesystem access over SSH" for example, if you give users unmanaged file or other systems access, it will be exploited and in reality, what most users (or at least my mother and father) want is to just use their phone and never think about it.

It's fair not to like it and it may be wrong, but to imply that apple did it just to frustrate power users is either misinformed or dishonest.

Lastly there's a cool ios project https://github.com/tbodt/ish that gives you an emulated shell. Works pretty well.

Other vendors used to allow you to do this back when internal storage was vfat formatted but it's not been an option these days because Windows and Macs wouldn't have the file system drivers to read the storage.

This is why MTP was created. However MTP is - in my experience - complete garbage and creates as many problems as it solves.

How do you do this on your iPhone? I, and others, are of the opinion that this cant be done.

Access to images and videos is read-only. So it can't be used like a USB drive.