> I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player."

This comes from [1] which is an interesting page.

It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately).

Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither.

Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

> Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not.

You can mount an iPhone as MTP. But only for pictures, not for music.

I kinda get why, but blah. It’s a bit of a weird distinction to me.

Sounds like maybe PTP?

MTP is necessary because Android uses ext4 (or maybe some use f2fs now) and so a Windows host would not be able to read the filesystem, as a mass storage device

> I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too.

This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS.

MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default.

That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…

I briefly considered penning a response called "Things I can’t do on Ubuntu which I can do on macOS" and then realised nobody has that much free time, especially me.

I think you are making an understandable misreading (but perhaps i am!). MTP is a standard promulgated by the USB Implementers Forum [1], just like the mass storage or human interface device protocols. What that paragraph means is that on Windows, MTP is dealt with by the media framework, as opposed to being part of the storage subsystem, as SMB and NFS are. Why is why you can't access MTP devices as if they were volumes on Windows.

[1] https://www.usb.org/document-library/media-transfer-protocol...