SMB on Android: Asus File Manager doesn't suck much.

[reddragdiva]

You'd think being able to write to and from an SMB share on the local wifi — e.g., your home NAS — was a simple and reasonable thing to do with a phone.

Google made an official SMB client for a while, but they withdrew it and now pretend it never happened. Nobody knows what the story is there.

So there's various third-party clients. They're mostly ad-infested dogshit, have a user interface from Satan that not even a geek could love, charge extra for basic protocols, or all three.

But! I discovered what appears to be the mythical Android SMB client that doesn't suck too much: the Asus File Manager.

It's the standard file manager for Asus' own phones — so it's designed for ordinary humans — but they put it up on the Play store. Frankly, it's good advertising for Asus phones.

The interface is a bit dogshit — but if you know what you're trying to do, then the process of dumping files and folders to/from the NAS is trivial.

(The Play store says it contains ads, but i've yet to see one.)

Bug 0: it only seems to do SMB1. Ew.

Bug 1: it doesn't recurse reliably. Always move your folders with "Copy", not "Move", just in case it fails to copy everything.

Bug 2: I got bitten by the "you must perform the certain steps" bug, when I swapped in a larger SD card. The app didn't have write permission for the card, even though I told it in Settings -> Apps that it did — it came up with an error, then gave three help screens that are only useful on an Asus phone.

(Apparently, the problem is something to do with Android no longer being happy with apps changing folders they didn't create? I'm not clear on the cause of the bug.)

The fix for this is:

1. Close Asus File Manager.
2. Settings -> Apps -> File Manager -> Storage — clear cache and data.
3. Restart the phone (without opening File Manager).
4. File Manager should now be able to write to the SD card.

(Yes, despite the above, this still sucks less than most SMB clients for Android.)

("but have you tried my personal favourite, XYZ Geek Dogshit SMB Client Pro Plus?" no, no I haven't. nor am I going to bother at this point.)

Comments

[zotz]

I have never been able to make anything involving Android and SD cards work properly for more than a few hours at a time.

[lovingboth]

Thanks.

Is there an issue when the SD card is treated as internal storage, tied to the device, rather than removable storage?

[reddragdiva]

When tracking down that second bug, I saw some reports that it behaved more sensibly in that case. And endless trouble if you switched a card from one to the other.