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Google is building its own DeX: First look at Android's Desktop Mode

(www.androidauthority.com)
442 points logic_node | 8 comments | 13 May 25 14:30 UTC | HN request time: 1.193s | source | bottom
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the_clarence ◴[13 May 25 14:56 UTC] No.43973667[source]▶
I switched from a lifetime of iPhones to an android phone last year, just because of folding phones. They are amazing and IMO the reason why Apple is going to have issues as these get cheaper (unless they release a folding phone too). Now that I have all this screen estate the current UI feels limiting often.
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permo-w ◴[13 May 25 14:58 UTC] No.43973686[source]▶
I switched from iPhone to android a month ago and it was so awful that I just went back to using my old phone. I treat the android device as essentially a powerbank with a camera, and even that it's bad at. plug it into my PC to transfer pictures? no response
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1. goosedragons ◴[13 May 25 15:05 UTC] No.43973762[source]▶
Is your PC a Mac? Apple doesn't support MTP because they want iPhones to look good or something. Every other OS with a reasonably complete Desktop Environment will allow mounting an Android device as what appears pretty much as a standard USB drive. It's part of why I prefer Android. Using an iPhone on Linux/BSD is just not worth the hassle.
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2. joshuaissac ◴[13 May 25 18:28 UTC] No.43976105[source]▶
> mounting an Android device as what appears pretty much as a standard USB drive

AFAIK Google got rid of built-in support for this in Android Jelly Bean. Additional tricks are needed to make later versions of Android behave as a USB Mass Storage device. If it works for you out of the box, I suspect it may be specific to your Android distro.

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3. Mogzol ◴[13 May 25 19:37 UTC] No.43976774[source]▶
They're talking about MTP, which is supported by every modern (and old) Android device AFAIK. It's not exactly a USB Mass Storage device, but as long as you're not on a Mac, it behaves basically the same as one.
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4. cosmic_cheese ◴[14 May 25 03:07 UTC] No.43980333[source]▶
I think it’s more that MTP is an awful protocol than anything else. It’s slow and flaky even under OSes that support it. It’s shocking to me that with all of the brilliant people working for Google, nobody has managed to figure out a better replacement.
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5. permo-w ◴[14 May 25 05:06 UTC] No.43981026[source]▶
>Is your PC a Mac?

certainly not

6. goosedragons ◴[14 May 25 09:46 UTC] No.43982655[source]▶
Maybe I've just been extraordinarily lucky but it's been nether of those things for me. It's also far superior to Apple's go through iTunes/Finder garbage protocol IMO.
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7. joshuaissac ◴[14 May 25 11:48 UTC] No.43983352{3}[source]▶
Ah, I was mistaken. I thought they were saying that the reason Apple supports MTP (as opposed to UMS) is not that they want to make iPhones look good, but for some other unspecified reason (which I assumed was patent licensing). But they were actually saying that Apple does not even support MTP.
8. cosmic_cheese ◴[14 May 25 12:06 UTC] No.43983517{3}[source]▶
Not saying that Apple has anything better, but I really don’t feel like the problem is adequately solved on Android either.

The easiest thing in my mind would be to use USB mass storage, with the storage presented to the connected computer being virtualized with a layer reconciling changes with actual storage on the fly (which the current MTP implementation already does anyway), solving the problem that USB mass storage traditionally has arising from two systems mounting the same chunk of disk at once.

That would work everywhere and remove the need for a bizarre protocol borrowed from Windows XP.