Alternatives to MTP for Android

MTP seems to be broken on my computers, I can't transfer files with Opus to/from my phone.

The recommended alternative is FTP, but it's extremely slow due to going over wifi. It also doesn't work with wifi device isolation, or LAN segregation.

What other options exist? I've tried using a USB ethernet adapter and it's fast but rapidly drains the battery.

You could use a cloud service and your phone's mobile radio, assuming your data plan is beefy enough. A good client is Solid Explorer, which directly supports several cloud connections (the usual suspects plus a few more).

Thanks, unfortunately my plan is not beefy enough. For reference, recently I hit about 1TB/month.

It seems that MTP has got stable enough that I can use it to copy data off the phone now. Copying back on his hit and miss, and trying to move, copy, or delete files is pretty much guaranteed to fail. But at least I can grab data at USB3 speeds.

Yes, if you copy one file at a time, that should work. Gotta take it easy with MTP :smiley:

FWIW, Wifi can be very fast these days, depending on the phone and access point.

With iOS I tend to use SMB instead of FTP, more for convenience (can do everything from the phone and put the files where I want in the phone’s storage, which an FTP server might not allow). Haven’t explored that option on Android though.

I have a fairly old Wifi access point these days but can get ~50 MB/s which is fine for almost any size of transfer.

ftp?
you can also use a program (windows) for this
which transfers the data to the cell phone via wifi.
the speed depends on the maximum performance of the router or cell phone
the interruptions and slow copying/moving at that time
or searching for the cable (not all suitable!) under mtp was annoying.

Part of the issue is that one of the devices I use is fairly old (2016) so doesn't have super fast WiFi. Also I often need to transfer data from my newer phone when I'm at a hotel, so even if their WiFi isn't partitioning clients, the chances of it being WiFi 6 or better is pretty low. I suppose I could set up a hot-spot on the phone, and get a newer WiFi card for my laptop...

The other option is to plug in a gigabit ethernet dongle. They rarely reach gigabit speeds, but are faster than WiFi. Again, not ideal at hotels.

If MTP wasn't working enough to just copy files, I'd probably use a USB flash drive.

It may (or may not) apply to your use scenario, but from what I observed, Android does not give a guaranteed CPU time for MTP. Other services and/or ordinary applications may throttle MTP.
What often helped was a reset to the factory state that killed always alive applications that steal CPU time and throttle MTP.

I might try a factory reset then. I'm just a little hesitant until I have a second device, in case it bricks this one.