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+. https://tether.cosmics.me I'd love feedback, since I've mostly tested on a Galaxy S25+. What would make you switch from whatever you use now?   submitted by   /u/TheMadPotato101 [link]   [comments]