Porterage and OpenMTP, difference by difference

• A folder opens in one pass

  MTP can describe a whole folder in one request per property. Asking about each file separately costs a round trip per file, and a camera folder holds hundreds.

  OpenMTP asks the phone for the list of handles, then sends a separate GetObjectInfo for every file in it, plus a second request again for any file whose size the first one could not carry.

  Porterage implements GetObjectPropList, which answers for the whole folder at once: one request per property rather than per file.

  0.4 s for 337 files · 3.2 s for 345 asked one at a time

• The photo grid shows the photos

  A folder of camera photos is the reason most people plug the cable in at all, and filenames like IMG_20260912_134522.jpg do not tell you which one you want.

  OpenMTP draws one icon per file extension, so every photo in the folder is the same generic JPEG glyph. You pick by name.

  Porterage shows the picture, by three routes, so the grid fills even for screenshots and downloads that carry no embedded thumbnail.

  36 ms each off the phone · about 15% need fetching and scaling on the Mac

• It still answers after the two hundredth file

  The phone raises an interrupt event for every object written. Leave that queue unread and it fills: copies slow to a crawl and then MTP stops answering altogether, and a USB reset does not bring it back; only unplugging the cable does.

  OpenMTP never reads it. Its engine does find the phone's event endpoint while connecting and keeps the address, and then never transfers on it. Every read and write it makes is a bulk transfer on the other two endpoints.

  Porterage polls that endpoint between slices and after every operation, waiting 10 ms each time: long enough to keep the queue clear, short enough not to be felt.

  Drained: 59 ms per small file, held across 1 000 in a row · undrained: 1 100 ms from the eleventh file, wedged for good at about 211

• A copy can be stopped

  MTP has a Cancel Request for this. Without it, stopping means simply not sending any more bytes, which leaves the phone waiting for the rest of a file it has already made room for.

  OpenMTP cannot. Its engine exports no cancel of any kind, and the progress window it puts up has no button, ignores Escape and cannot be clicked away.

  Porterage sends the Cancel Request, then asks for the device status until the phone answers that it is ready again.

  Stopped at 25% and at 90%: returned in 0.3–0.4 s, nothing left on the phone, the next copy fine

• An interrupted copy does not look finished

  Cables get knocked out. What matters afterwards is whether you can tell which files actually arrived, and whether you have to start the big one over.

  OpenMTP creates the file under its real, final name and writes into it from the first byte. Lose the cable and a half file sits in the folder looking complete; copying it again starts from zero.

  Porterage writes name.part and gives it the real name only once the last byte lands. Copy it into the same folder again and it carries on from the bytes already there.

  Stopped at 50%: the .part held 256 MiB, the rest came at 37.9 MiB/s, SHA-256 identical

• A name that is taken is a question about that file

  Dropping a hundred photos into a folder that already holds twenty of them should not be a choice between overwriting all of it and copying none of it.

  OpenMTP shows one dialog for the whole drop — “Replace and merge the existing items?” — which does not say which files clash. Confirming replaces every one of them; refusing copies nothing at all. On the phone each replacement deletes first and writes second, so a copy that fails has already removed the original.

  Porterage names the file and offers Keep Both, Replace or Skip — asked once for the whole drop, in both directions, before a byte is written.

  Both clash questions, both directions, checked · Keep Both writes name (2).ext

• A drop that will not fit is refused before it starts

  The phone will not protect you here: it accepts a declared size far larger than it can hold and only fails once it has actually run out, minutes in. Its reported free space, though, is exact to the byte.

  OpenMTP does not look. It adds up the drop for its own progress bar and starts sending. Its engine can read the phone's free space, which OpenMTP prints in the title bar, but nothing in the copy path ever consults it.

  Porterage weighs the whole drop against the phone's free space first and says how much is missing, without copying anything.

  A 200 GiB drop refused up front · 64 MiB written moved free space by exactly 64.1 MiB, and back on delete

• Nothing leaves the Mac

  A file transfer app has no reason to talk to the internet, and what a phone is and what is on it are not ordinary usage statistics.

  OpenMTP reports usage unless you turn it off. The shipped build starts with it on and sends, to Mixpanel, a hashed machine id, the Mac's OS version, the phone's maker, model and MTP version, and after every copy its direction, file count, average speed and elapsed time.

  Porterage makes no network connections at all — not for usage, not for crashes, not even to see whether a new version exists. There is nothing to turn off.

  enableAnalytics: true in OpenMTP's shipped settings · one switch in its Settings turns it off

Five of these eight are about what happens when something goes wrong: an interruption, a clash, a full phone, a change of mind, a queue nobody drained. That is where the work went, and it is not the part a feature list shows.

• 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.