When we first had a look at the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, we were a little bit shocked to find out USB mass storage wasn’t supported on the device, leading us to think that it was a missing feature in Android 4.0.
Android engineer Dan Morrill took to the internet to sort out this confusion and ease our panicking minds, explaining that Ice Cream Sandwich does indeed support the feature, but only on devices that offer removable storage cards. This explains why we weren’t able to use it on the Nexus; panic now over. Here’s exactly why, according to Dan:
“It isn’t physically possible to support UMS on devices that don’t have a dedicated partition for storage (like a removable SD card, or a separate partition like Nexus S.) This is because UMS is a block-level protocol that gives the host PC direct access to the physical blocks on the storage, so that Android cannot have it mounted at the same time.
With the unified storage model we introduced in Honeycomb, we share your full 32GB (or 16GB or whatever) between app data and media data. That is, no more staring sadly at your 5GB free on Nexus S when your internal app data partition has filled up — it’s all one big happy volume.
However the cost is that Android can no longer ever yield up the storage for the host PC to molest directly over USB. Instead we use MTP. On Windows (which the majority of users use), it has built-in MTP support in Explorer that makes it look exactly like a disk. On Linux and Mac it’s sadly not as easy, but I have confidence that we’ll see some work to make this better.”
Mystery solved. And thank god for that, because if ICS did not support USB mass storage, it would be a massive fail on Google’s part.
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