I make Android and iOS apps.

But only because people want me to and pay for it... I wouldn't inflict the trauma that is using these on anyone.

I had problems with every single Android I owned, here is the current one:

1. Super slow, even after reformatting everything and reinstalling, it is not even a cheap phone.

2. Terrible interfaces overall, specially as they keep removing physical buttons, and apps started to shove important buttons (like "menu") in random places.

3. The interface thread seemly is prone to freezing, for example yesterday I wanted to use youtube, and the interface froze, and then suddenly opened a video I didn't wanted, and started playing full blast volume and waking people up, and I couldn't figure how to close the damn video, and then suddenly it crashed.

4. This all applies to the actual phone parts... more than once I had to quickly dial someone for some emergency reason (not life or death, but still emergency), and the phone app decide to be slow, or crash, or reboot, and so on.

5. Had the phone app crash on me while I was actually talking to someone.

And this is just my personal phone, in other phones I had one that I had to reinstall and the phone antenna stopped working after the reinstall (it needed a custom antenna driver, that I had to track down on internet and install...), random reboots, slow, extremely fast draining of the battery, specially if you made some mistake like leave a GPS-enabled app running, nevermind the fact that the OS itself is so crap, that every manufacturer ship the phone with several third party apps to fix OS problems (memory managers and defragmenters, app killers, temporary file cleaners, and so on...)

iPhone has another set of problems, but still is problematic. I personally would never buy one (my current client I am testing his iOS code on a device he provided to me...)

The Android ecosystem us chock full of phones at various price points and quality levels, and questionable "value add" software added by OEMS and carriers.

I have been very happy with Nexus phones (going back to Nexus S), and have never experienced any of those issues.

We also have 3 Motorola G phones - which for the money (<200) are really hard to beat. Motorola seems to have not attempted to mess with the stock O/S all that much..

I love my Nexus 5. Add an SD card slot and a fingerprint reader and it'd be the perfect phone, IMO.

This has gotten worse over time as well. It used to be you could mount your phone's storage as a mass storage device, but now (as far as I can tell) MTP is the only option.

Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this? After I figured out where the filesystem was mounted (a bit of a pain), I could use it like a normal mount, as if it were an external USB drive.

MTP is a bit of a mess.

First off, file access is mediated via software on the Android side. What you are seeing is a database representation of the device FS. And this database can be incorrect (people have in the past deleted folders they thought were empty only to lose files) or used to implement DRM.

Second, it is bloody slow.

Interesting. Is there a way to bypass this and mount the phone as an ordinary filesystem, as in the old days?

Depends on the device. Some offer it, some don't. And those that offer it run into the issue of having partitioned internal storage.

The one benefit of MTP is that Android do not have to unmount the FS you are trying to access.

You need a Linux kernel that offers the feature over the USB port

> Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this?

For the longest time MTP & Linux was terribly painful, verging on unusable, while mass storage worked perfectly. It bit when I upgraded my Nexus phone and discovered I couldn't get to the files stored on it.

Fortunately, all seems to work well now.

The reason for implementing MTP instead of mass storage was clear, because you couldn't / wouldn't be able to access the files from the phone while the computer was accessing them. So I understand why they went in that direction.

But oh my goodness! MTP support on Linux was terrible for a while, and even on Windows it wasn't fast and reliable. It was easier at the time to just use a service like Dropbox to transfer files to/from the phone, than to use USB.

My HTC One M8 lets me choose between mounting as a drive, MTP, or just charging. Maybe that's a general Marshmallow feature but it's great.