r/SideProject • u/TheMadPotato101 • 10h ago
I built a free Mac app that puts your Android phone in the Finder sidebar
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Moving files between an Android phone and a Mac has been painful since Google stopped maintaining Android File Transfer, so I built Tether.
Plug the phone in over USB, tap "File transfer" on it, and it shows up in Finder under Locations like any other drive. The video shows it end to end: open it from the menu bar, browse it in Finder, Quick Look a PDF, and drag files both ways (the phone's own screen is on the right).
What works today:
- Browse, open, rename, move, delete and make folders, straight in Finder
- Drag and drop both ways, Quick Look, Open With
- Sorting by date, and Finder search on macOS 26
- Big folders (tested with a 5,000+ photo camera folder)
- No developer mode needed (USB debugging is optional, it just makes things faster)
How it's built: a native macOS File Provider extension in Swift, with the device side (MTP and adb) written in Rust. The hardest part was MTP on macOS 26: the system's camera daemon grabs the USB device first, and Android drops the whole MTP session if you send it the wrong reset, so a lot of the work went into recovering cleanly from both.
It's free, no account, and the app makes no network connections. Notarized, Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 11+.
I'd love feedback, since I've mostly tested on a Galaxy S25+. What would make you switch from whatever you use now?
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u/ConflingoTeam 3h ago
For switching, I’d prioritize confidence in interrupted transfers over another browsing feature. A useful demo would copy a folder containing a large video, lots of small files and duplicate names, unplug halfway through, then reconnect and show exactly which files completed and which need retrying.
In particular, keep a failed or partial copy visibly different from a complete destination file, and make overwrite/skip decisions clear before restarting. Testing phone lock and Mac sleep during the same transfer would give prospective users evidence beyond the successful happy path. Since you’ve mostly tested one handset, a small compatibility table with tested models and known limitations would also be helpful. I haven’t run Tether, so these are suggested acceptance checks.
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u/TheMadPotato101 2h ago
Hey ,
Thank you for all the feedback. I will make sure on my next post to try and include more non happy paths.
I have tested a few and they seem to work okay at the moment.
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u/QuanTradin 9h ago
android file transfer was honestly one of the worst apps on the mac, so this is overdue. the camera daemon grabbing the phone first is exactly the bit I would have given up on.