Porterage
Porterage vs OpenMTP
Porterage and OpenMTP, compared on what can be checked
OpenMTP is the app most people find first, and it is a good one: open source, seven years old, signed by Apple, and free. This page reports every difference that could be established by opening both shipped builds — including the rows where OpenMTP is ahead, and the one question that has not been measured yet.
They talk to the phone the same way
This is the first thing to get out of the way, because the usual comparison gets it wrong. OpenMTP's current engine is not the old library everyone blames.
Porterage 0.1.1
A native Mac app in Swift and AppKit. It implements MTP itself and drives the cable through
libusb. One universal binary, nothing else installed, no runtime underneath it.
OpenMTP 3.3.0
An Electron app — Chromium 100 and Node — wrapped around an engine of its own called Kalam,
written in Go, which also drives the cable through libusb. An older
mtp-cli engine ships alongside it as a fallback for phones Kalam cannot see.
Kalam is the default: OpenMTP's own settings state starts at mtpMode: MTP_MODE.kalam,
and its description of the other mode is “Previous generation MTP kernel. Use this if Kalam mode
doesn't detect your phone.” Kalam's library links libusb.dylib directly, shipped
next to it in the bundle. So the two apps reach the phone by the same route, and none of the
differences below is a protocol trick.
What actually lands on the Mac
The same job, wrapped very differently. Both figures are the shipped artefacts for Apple silicon, weighed rather than quoted.
The download
Both bars share one scale. Porterage ships one file for both architectures; OpenMTP ships a separate build per architecture, the Intel one 128.2 MB. Sixty times the download.
Installed, in Applications
Both bars share one scale. 195.5 MB of OpenMTP's install is the Electron framework and its helper processes; 172.5 MB is the application bundle. Eighty-eight times the disk.
Row by row
Every line was taken from the two shipped builds or from their own release pages on 17 September 2026.
| Porterage 0.1.1 | OpenMTP 3.3.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Download | 2.1 MB, one file for both architectures | 126.2 MB Apple silicon, 128.2 MB Intel |
| Installed size | 4.2 MB | 368.2 MB |
| Built as | Native Swift and AppKit | Electron 18.3.15, on Chromium 100 |
| Talks to the phone via | Its own MTP implementation over libusb | Kalam, a Go engine, over libusb — with mtp-cli as a fallback |
| Runs on | Apple silicon and Intel, from one binary | A separate build per architecture |
| Minimum macOS | 14.0 | 10.11 |
| Signed and notarised | No — macOS blocks the first launch | Yes — opens normally |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| First released | 17 September 2026 | December 2018 |
| Price | Free | Free |
Where OpenMTP is ahead
Four of these are not close, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this page worth less.
-
It opens without a detour.
OpenMTP is signed with a Developer ID and notarised, so macOS lets it run on the first double-click. Porterage is not signed yet: macOS blocks it, and you have to allow it once in System Settings → Privacy & Security.
-
It runs on far older Macs.
macOS 10.11 and later, against 14.0 for Porterage. If your Mac cannot run Sonoma, Porterage is not an option at all.
-
It has seven years behind it.
First released in December 2018, 7,372 stars on GitHub, and roughly 65,000 downloads of the current Apple silicon build. Porterage was released on 17 September 2026 and has been tested properly against one phone model.
-
It is a finished product.
Settings, themes, an in-app updater, and years of reported edge cases already found and fixed. Porterage is at 0.1.1 and says so on its own front page.
What is not on this page yet
Speed. The one thing a comparison is usually for, and the one thing not measured here.
Porterage's own figures — a folder of 337 files listed in 0.4 s, 59 ms per small file across a thousand, 38 MiB/s off the phone — were taken on a Redmi 9T against a MacBook Air M1, and they are on the front page with the conditions they were taken under. They are measurements of Porterage. They are not a comparison with OpenMTP, and this site will not present them as one.
The comparison that would be fair is a straightforward one: the same phone, the same cable, the same folder, back to back — Porterage against Kalam's own library, which exposes the listing and transfer calls directly and so can be timed without a stopwatch on a window. That run has not happened yet. When it does, the numbers go here whichever way they come out.
Which one to install
On what is known today, rather than on which page you happen to be reading.
Reach for OpenMTP
- Your Mac is older than macOS 14
- You want an app that just opens, with no security detour
- You would rather have the mature one than the new one
Reach for Porterage
- 2 MB of native app beats 126 MB of Chromium, to you
- You want the connection to name which of five states it is in
- You want every claim on a site to come with its conditions
They install side by side and neither one needs anything on the phone, so trying both costs a download. Only one can hold the cable at a time: quit the other before plugging in.
Try the 2 MB one first. It is a small download to undo.
Free, open source, macOS 14 or later. If it cannot reach your phone it will tell you which of the five states it is in, and what to do about it.