Android FTP Server

Stuart Langridge passed on a great idea that hadn’t occurred to me – running an FTP server on an Android phone. Although my i7500 is pretty much permanently connected via USB when I’m in the house, on account of needing to be sure the battery will be charged when I leave the house, I don’t particularly want to have to mount the USB drive and manually transfer things. Apart from requiring ME to do the work, which defeats the whole object of machines, the computer I connect it to isn’t necessarily the one I want to transfer files to/from. Also, a card can only be mounted to one device at once, so by mounting it to the remote computer, you snatch it away from the Android device, which isn’t always ideal.

Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?

• It generates a random ‘password’ (actually a 4-digit number) every time you run it. This makes automating anything impossible.
• The user interface. It’s horrible. To me, that is. I guess some people like a great big arty fart drawing of a button the size of the screen, with the actually user interface relegated to a tiny dot in the corner. Usable software trumps software that (to some) looks nice. Especially when the giant button picture is taking up storage space, which is not infinite.
• You can only get to /sdcard, not the rest of the filesystem.
• It’s closed source. All my gripes, and Stuart’s minor ones, are simple five minute fixes. But not if the developer deliberately makes it impossible. Very annoying.

A bit of a washout then? No – the gem was the idea, not the software, and I found something much better. SwiFTP is GPL licensed, already includes all the required functionality that On Air was lacking, and has a sane user interface. Clearly the developer spent his ‘drawing a great big stupid button’ time on useful things instead.

A few things I will be using this for:

• Automatically transferring data to the phone from a queue – e.g. the latest Rathole Radio, for listening to in the car.
• Automatically backing up data from the phone.
• Automatically retrieving specific things, e.g. GPS tracks, photos, and putting them in the appropriate database.
• All kinds of other geeky and anal things beginning with the word ‘automatically’ that I haven’t thought of yet.

So, thanks to Stuart for sharing the idea, and thanks to Dave Revell for sharing the software.