Honourable mentions
Comprador isn't the only good way to move files between a phone and a Mac, and it stands on open-source work that came before it. Honest brokerage means saying so. Here are the projects we tip our hat to.
The ones we stand on
OpenMTP is the project Comprador was forked from. It's a free, open-source MTP app for macOS that gives you a dedicated dual-pane file-manager window, and for years it was the answer for Android-on-Mac. Comprador took a different shape — a Finder volume instead of a window, and a clean reimplementation underneath — but the repository began as OpenMTP's, and the debt is real.
libmtp is the engine. It's the C library that actually speaks the Media Transfer Protocol to your device — the decade-plus of reverse-engineering and per-device quirk-handling that makes any of this possible. Comprador is, in honest terms, a friendly face on libmtp's work. It ships bundled in the app, with its licence.
Kindred libraries
Comprador isn't the only project that pries a closed device open and hands everyone the result — it belongs to a long tradition of it. libimobiledevice did for the iPhone what libmtp did for MTP: a volunteer community reverse-engineered Apple's locked sync protocols so any operating system could talk to an iPhone or iPad — no iTunes, no jailbreak — and then gave the work away. libgphoto2 does the same for digital cameras, the decades of protocol-wrangling behind gPhoto2. All three are one act of generosity pointed at different hardware, freely licensed, and Comprador is a small Mac-shaped continuation of it.
For a job we don't do
KDE Connect and its macOS client Soduto move files over Wi-Fi, not USB. Comprador is deliberately USB-only, so if you'd rather not reach for a cable — and you want notifications, clipboard sync and remote control thrown in — this is the wireless half of the story. Apple or not, you want your devices in symphony.
LocalSend is the open-source way to do the same across your own network — fling a file from phone to laptop, or between any two platforms, with no account, no cloud, and nothing leaving the local Wi-Fi. Think AirDrop that doesn't care who made your devices.
scrcpy does a different job again: it mirrors and controls your Android screen from the Mac over USB, and it's some of the most-loved free software in the Android world (Apache-2.0). Its one catch is the very thing Comprador spares you — it speaks ADB, so you'll need Developer Options and USB debugging switched on. For files that's friction we'd rather skip; for driving the whole phone from your desk, it's well worth it.
The one that came before
Android File Transfer is where almost everyone started, and the reason this whole category exists. Google quietly pulled its download in early 2024, and it's now effectively gone: unmaintained, a 4 GB file cap, and increasingly broken on Apple Silicon. We mention it because it walked so the rest could mount.
On Linux none of this is needed in the same way — simple-mtpfs, jmtpfs, and GNOME's gvfs already expose MTP devices through the file manager. Comprador exists because macOS doesn't.
The look of the place
Comprador wears two-hundred-year-old engravings, and we owe that to people long gone and to the institutions that keep their work free. The butterfly on the pomegranate in the icon is a detail from a 1705 plate by Maria Sibylla Merian — an early naturalist who documented insect metamorphosis from life — engraved by Pieter Sluyter. The shifting backdrop behind every page is the work of Filippo Morghen, an 18th-century Italian engraver, from his series imagining fantastical life on the Moon.
Both reach us, scanned and unlocked, through the Public Domain Image Archive and the Biodiversity Heritage Library with the Smithsonian. The works are public domain worldwide; the organizations that digitize and release them are the reason a small free app can dress itself in museum-grade art for nothing. The typefaces are the same kind of gift — Bona Nova, Igino Marini's IM Fell Double Pica SC, Fasthand and Syne Mono, all offered freely under the SIL Open Font License. Full credits and licences are in the project's third-party notices.
Comprador takes nothing for any of this. If you'd like to keep these works free for the next person, support the ones who do the digitising — the Public Domain Review, which runs the Image Archive, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.