Recently, I've been working on getting my Pinephone into a more usable
state. In fact, I plan to do another weekly challenge of daily driving
my Pinephone. In my mind, there is one glaring issue with Pinephone,
and it's somewhat ironic: file transfer is downright painful. Why? MTP
is disabled by default, and the previous MTP solution requires zero
authentication to get root access to the device, or so they say.
As of right now, the only way I can transfer files without pulling out
the microSD is to use SFTP or SSHFS. This is problematic for three
main reasons:
1) Transfer speeds are generally much slower.
2) You have to get the internal IP address via ifconfig.
3) The other device has to be on the same network and have
SSHD or SSHFS on it in order to work.
At home, 2 and 3 aren't really issues as I've already reserved IP
addresses for most of my devices, including the Pinephone. However,
they are huge issues when using non-home networks. At work, while
ostensibly using the same network, the WiFi and wired networks are on
different VPNs, meaning it would require some port forwarding
shenanigans just to do this nonsense SFTP "solution." The problem is I
have no ability to do it myself and I'd, at best, be laughed at for
asking a large institution to do port forwarding just to move files to
and from my personal phone. It is a really stupid situation to be in,
regardless of whether you think I should do file management on my
personal phone at work or not.
The second issue I've run into is my microSD card refuses to mount as
rw. It is read-only no matter what I try. I've tried unmounting,
remounting, editing fstab, mounting with different CLI options, etc.
At this point, I'm wondering if the phone is mounting it somewhere
else and thus new mount points are going read-only, but I can't find
it in fstab. Not a huge deal as I wasn't planning on hosting a bunch
of files on the external SD, but it's really annoying. It's also quite
possible I need to download one of those ntfs-3g packages that
properly enable true exFAT access. In that case, it's really stupid
that I can still read the partition at all. I think it's exFAT, but
it's 32GB so it could possibly just be fat?
It's important to note that this may be due to something of which I'm
unaware and/or user error, but it's still ridiculous that network
tunneling is the "easiest" way to transfer files. It's also possible
other distros like Ubuntu Touch have a good MTP solution, but that
just begs the question why other open-source projects wouldn't or
haven't ported it...
Why is it ironic? Because I'm moving from Android, an OS whose
direction is more and more gearing away towards expandable storage. I
read a post, I think on Gopher, that said Big G was waging war on
expandable storage and that support would be removed...in 2022. The
post was from 3 years ago, and while I don't have the latest and worst
Android version, I haven't seen much mitigation of the ability to use
a separate microSD card beyond what they did with Android 10 and
basically hiding the Android Files app: you basically have to jump
through Settings > Storage > (click a category like Videos) just to
open it. IOS is even worse and I don't even know if they've EVER
allowed expandable storage. Meanwhile, the champions of freedom can't
get a secure MTP solution.
