Macinroid

Macinroid is a native macOS app for moving photos, videos and files between your Mac and an Android phone over USB. It's a port of OpenMTP to Swift and SwiftUI.

Plug in your phone and its storage opens in a window that works the way Finder does. Drag photos straight to your desktop, drop files onto the phone, or copy and paste between the two.

Support

Macinroid is free. If it saves you some time, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.

Features

• Drag and drop files between the two systems
• Browse the phone's internal storage and SD card from the sidebar.
• Thumbnails of the phone's photos and videos, in list and icon view.
• Quick Look any file on the phone with Space.
• Storage capacity at a glance, and the phone's details under Device Info.
• Light and dark appearance, and Liquid Glass on macOS 26.
• One universal app for Apple silicon and Intel. No drivers, no extra software.

Requirements

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later
• An Android phone, and a USB cable that carries data (some only charge)

Install

With Homebrew:

brew install --cask anyfikra/tap/macinroid

Later versions arrive with brew upgrade --cask macinroid.

Or download Macinroid-<version>.zip from the latest release, unzip it, and move Macinroid to your Applications folder. The app is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other.

Getting started

1. Open Macinroid and connect your phone with a USB cable.
2. Unlock the phone, tap the Charging this device via USB notification, and under Use USB for choose File Transfer.
3. If the phone asks Allow access to phone data?, tap Allow.

The phone's storage appears in the window. If it doesn't, Help ▸ Macinroid Help walks through the usual causes, and Help ▸ Report a Problem creates a report with every USB device macOS sees and a trace of the connection attempt.

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Keys
Download to the download folder / to another folder	⌘D / ⌥⌘D
Upload files	⌘U
Copy, to paste in Finder	⌘C
Paste files copied in Finder	⌘V
New folder	⇧⌘N
Rename	Return
Delete	⌘⌫
Open	⌘O or ⌘↓
Quick Look	Space or ⌘Y
Enclosing folder	⌘↑
Back / Forward	⌘[ / ⌘]
Go to folder	⇧⌘G
Refresh	⌘R
Icons / List	⌘1 / ⌘2
Show hidden files	⇧⌘.
Device info	⌘I
Cancel the transfer	⌘.

Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts lists them all.

Building from source

Requirements: Xcode 26. XcodeGen is only needed if you change project.yml. The app lives in app/.

cd app
open Macinroid.xcodeproj          # then Run, or:
xcodebuild -project Macinroid.xcodeproj -scheme Macinroid -configuration Release build
xcodebuild -project Macinroid.xcodeproj -scheme Macinroid test

The project signs the app to run locally. To distribute it, select your team in the target's Signing & Capabilities. After editing project.yml, regenerate the project with xcodegen generate.

To try the app without a phone, launch it with a simulated one:

open Macinroid.app --args -SimulatedDevice YES

The simulated phone is a folder in ~/Library/Caches/Macinroid/SimulatedDevice, filled with sample content. Its transfers are slowed down so that progress and cancelling can be watched.

Website

The website in website/ is plain HTML and CSS, with no build step. Its images are the ones in assets/, which website/assets links to. The Website workflow publishes it to GitHub Pages when either changes on main. To preview it:

python3 -m http.server -d website     # then open http://localhost:8000

How it works

app/
  Macinroid/
    App/            app entry point, menus
    Core/
      Models/       files, devices, errors, transfers
      Engine/       DeviceBackend: the MTP engine, and the simulated phone
        MTP/        USB transport, MTP sessions, file operations
      Services/     local files, USB hot-plug, settings, logging, updates, problem reports
      State/        AppModel, BrowserModel (one per pane), DeviceSession, TransferCoordinator
    Features/       the interface: main window, file views, transfers, sheets, settings, help
  MacinroidTests/

The interface is SwiftUI, with NSTableView and NSCollectionView for the file lists. AppModel is the one place where user actions are carried out, so the menus, the toolbar, the context menus and drag and drop all run the same code.

Android phones share their files over MTP, the Media Transfer Protocol. Macinroid speaks it itself, in Swift, with no bundled libraries:

• USBTransport finds the phone and talks to it through IOUSBHost, macOS's USB framework. It reads USB descriptors itself, and selects a phone's configuration when macOS has not.
• MTPSession handles MTP's transactions: commands, data and responses, in the packets USB carries them in, and cancels a transfer by asking the phone to stop.
• MTPFileSystem turns MTP's objects and handles into paths, listings and transfers of whole folder trees.

The tests run the engine against FakeMTPDevice, a simulated phone that speaks the same wire protocol, down to short and empty USB packets.

Known limitations

• MTP allows one operation at a time, so the phone's files can't be browsed while a transfer is running.
• Finder can only paste files that are already on the Mac, so copying on the phone fetches the items to a temporary folder first. For large amounts, dragging to Finder or Download is quicker.
• Quick Look shows a copy of the file on the Mac, so a large video takes a moment to arrive before it plays.
• Files can't be moved within the phone. Copying within it works by copy and paste.
• Cancelling in the middle of a file relies on the phone honouring MTP's cancel request; if it does not, Macinroid reconnects, which takes a second or two.
• Dates from the phone are read as local time, which is right when the phone and the Mac are set to the same time zone.

Acknowledgements

Macinroid is a rewrite of OpenMTP by Ganesh Rathinavel as a native Mac app. Its MTP engine follows the behaviour of the Go libraries OpenMTP is built on, go-mtpfs and go-mtpx. Their licences are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.