Comment 7 for bug 986722

Hi, I recently posted this in bug 903422:

Have you tried using jmtpfs?

http://research.jacquette.com/jmtpfs-exchanging-files-between-android-devices-and-linux/

It's working for me on my Galaxy Nexus (JB and ICS), and I've also had luck with it with a Galaxy S3 (ICS). (I'm using 12.04 with the latest libmtp)

Unfortunately mtp is still really slow: keep in mind it was never really designed to scale, and mapping it on to a filesystem will always be imperfect.

The long and the short of it, it seems the bug is NOT in libmtp (since jmtpfs also uses libmtp). gmtp and gvfsd uses a much older method to access mtp devices which involves downloading the entire directory structure beforehand. Turns out that this can take a looooong time (mtp is *SLOW*) which causes timeouts and very unhelpful error messages in the rest of the system.

Google put everyone slightly between a rock and a hard place here. The options are:
1) Support old-style (Microsoft) devices and fail horribly on new-style (Android). (Do nothing)
2) Break backward compatibility (HEAVEN FORBID!)
3) Emulate what Windows does. Since they seemed to design it for Windows in the first place...

I have a private bet with myself what the eventual solution is going to be. I hope I'm wrong.

Jan