NandroidFS

What is NandroidFS?

NandroidFS is a filesystem for Windows which allows Android devices connected to your PC via the Android Debug Bridge to be mounted as though they were a regular drive connected to your PC. (with a drive letter for each device)

NandroidFS is not a kernel mode driver, but instead uses Dokan. This allows NandroidFS, which runs as a regular user-mode application, to respond to filesystem requests.

Why use NandroidFS?

Android devices can already be accessed in Windows Explorer using the Media Transfer Protocol, however this does NOT mean that they are mounted as drives. So you can't use the device in the terminal/shell scripts. Explorer's MTP integration is slow and limited, and this is somewhat inevitable given the limitations of the protocol.

MTP only allows downloading/uploading a whole file, and has no support for editing files in place/streaming data.

How to use

1. Install dokan library v2.1.0
2. Download and run the latest NandroidFS installer from github actions
3. NandroidFS will run once the installer exits and on startup.
4. Plug in an Android device and allow USB debugging. NandroidFS will mount it to the next available drive letter.

Licensing

NandroidFS is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3. The full text can be found here.

Development

Project structure

NandroidFS has two parts:

• A client, nandroidfs.exe, which runs on the Windows computer and connects to...
• A daemon/agent, nandroid-daemon, which runs on any connected Android devices and communicates with the client with sockets, using adb forward to forward ports from the Android device to the Windows computer.

Compilation Instructions

Requirements

To manually install:

• Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ package installed.
• Dokan driver v2.1.0 installed as is required to run the app.

Installed by script, run ./install_deps.ps1 to install any of these dependencies that are missing:

• Dokan headers and libs in nandroidfs/dependencies
• Android NDK r27 with path set on ANDROID_NDK_HOME.
• Inno setup (for building the installer if desired.)

Instructions

1. • Navigate to ./nandroid_daemon and run ./build.ps1
2. • Open the NandroidFS.sln file in Visual Studio 2022 and change the configuration to Release. Press Ctrl + Shift + B to build or use the button to build and run the app.