Android File Transfer not working? Here's what actually happened
If the little green robot app suddenly says “Could not connect to device”, it is not your cable and it is not your phone. Google quietly walked away from Android File Transfer — and macOS kept moving without it.
The short version
Google discontinued Android File Transfer and removed its official download. The app had gone years without a meaningful update, and each new release of macOS broke it a little more: devices not detected, transfers freezing mid-copy, the infamous empty white window. If it stopped working after a macOS update, that is expected — nobody is maintaining it anymore.
Step by step, with the screens: how to transfer files from Android to Mac, over Wi-Fi or by cable.
Why it was always fragile
Android File Transfer spoke MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) — a protocol designed for music players two decades ago. On macOS, MTP was never native, so the app had to emulate support, which is why it could only handle one operation at a time, disconnected at random, struggled with very large files, and never verified that what arrived matched what left the phone. When it "worked", it worked slowly and blindly.
Every real alternative, compared honestly
| Option | Speed | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| OpenMTP | Slow (MTP) | Free and open source with a much better interface — but it speaks the same fragile MTP protocol underneath, with the same disconnects and no integrity check. |
| Google Drive / Photos | Upload-limited | A 20 GB batch of videos means hours of uploading and then downloading again. Depending on settings, photos may be recompressed. Ongoing storage costs. |
| Quick Share | — | Official desktop app is Windows-only. There is no Quick Share for Mac. |
| adb (terminal) | Cable speed | A direct path — this is developer tooling that talks to the phone directly, no MTP. But it lives in the terminal and has zero interface. |
The direct lane, wrapped in a Mac app
That last row is the interesting one: Android's own debug bridge moves files at whatever speed the cable allows, with none of MTP's fragility. Professionals have quietly used it for years. What was missing was a simple Mac app around it.
That is exactly what ZiggSend is: a menu-bar app that uses that same direct channel, shows you "12 new · 8.4 GB" when you plug in, imports everything with one click (“Import now”), and verifies every file (SHA-256 when the phone can compute it, exact size otherwise) — anything that arrives different from the original is discarded and flagged, never silently kept. No folders to dig through, no terminal, no cloud, no account. ZiggSend also works over your own Wi-Fi, from Android or iPhone, to a Mac or a Windows PC.