As a possible explanation for this issue, I think that if you use the internet to share data, it's more likely that Google makes money from some of the interactions (either via ads in the app or via play store tax or idk because the service is hosted in GCP or whatever) than if you used an internet-free method, so Google doesn't prioritize bugfixes that would hurt their revenue. Edit: would love to be proven wrong though!
Wikipedia tells the sordid story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#Compar...
Nevertheless, it's still removable storage that can take the place of the most common use case of portable flash drives: moving files around from one computer to another. Which is explicitly what we were originally talking about.
Pointing out that it doesn't work for some other use case that you yourself brought up doesn't make any sense. That's not what everyone else was talking about.
Ultimately this is an argument about the precise semantics of "removable storage". I don't regard an MTP device as "removable storage" - it's another computer that one speaks to using a special protocol, with severe limitations. So is an iPhone - with special, protocol-speaking software, you can certainly put arbitrary files on it. I interpreted the parent to mean that they wanted to plug the phone in to "any PC" and have it Just Work. MTP isn't so great at that, especially from my perspective as a Linux user, where MTP support is no more built-in than iOS-protocol support. From this standpoint, "removable storage" == "USB mass storage".
On the other hand, it sounds like whatever Apple provides is much worse even than MTP, and less well supported in general.
This is absurd. You don't get to tell someone, "you're wrong", then later when it's pointed out that the original assertion was actually true, then say, "oh, I meant that you're wrong as long as we're using my version of the word, the one that's very different from the one everyone else was using."
Sorry, but that's blatantly disingenuous. The original context was very clear. If you really meant, "well it sort of works as removable storage in one sense, but not in this other sense" you should've just said that to begin with.
They don't? Since when? I still have a Pixel 1 but it's running Android P, so the latest major version of Android, and this still works fine.
I don't think that's true. My S8 storage is mounted and accessible from my computer right now while at the same time playing music from the same storage. I can still take pictures/write to the storage.
Pointing out that the protocol used is leaky or bad in some technical way doesn't change that Android phones do in fact show up as removable storage devices when connected to (at least Windows) PC's. Your original assertion was incorrect.
samcday even said they just wanted to copy some files around. You don't need to be able to modify files in-place from the PC to accomplish this.
What could be done is to dedicate a file on the phone as block storage, and expose that as a mass storage device. This would suffer from the same problem (of the phone not being able to access it at the same time), but if it's dedicated "flash drive emulation" space then perhaps this behavior won't be as surprising to the user.