Episode: 2364
Title: HPR2364: Managing Your Android with AirDroid
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2364/hpr2364.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:45:00

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This in HPR episode 2364 entitled Managing Your Android With AirRoid.
It is hosted by Frank Mel and in about 15 minutes long and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is, Frank discuss in AirRod, an app for Managing Your Android Fire A Browler.
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Hello, this is Frank Bell and I want to talk about an Android app that I use every
day, sometimes several times a day, it's called AirRoid and as you would gather from the
name it's available in the Play Store.
It's also available for Mac and Windows and various formats.
You can find that at the website which is www.airjoid.com.
That link will be in the show notes.
I use this application for transferring files to and from my HTC One Android phone.
Usually I'm transferring podcasts to the phone so I can listen to them on the go.
Occasantly I am transferring pictures or other files from the phone to my local computer.
There are also a number of other features available in the app for managing your phone.
These I seldom use but I will mention them.
There is a free version and there is also a premium version which requires an account
on the AirRoid website and I will have the link in the show notes where you can go and
read about that premium version.
Most of the items in the premium version had no interest whatsoever to me so I am going
to talk strictly about my usage of the free version.
Here's how it works and I am going to do this on this other computer right over here.
I hit my KVM switch, type in my security code and start the AirDroid app.
When it starts you are looking at the My Devices screen.
The other three screens that are available there is a nearby screen you can apparently
use the premium version to find people who are near you and they friend's version.
I have never used and now I have no interest in either of those.
I am interested in the file transfer version and the initial screen there is a little
add which I can easily ignore and I am very good at ignoring advertisements.
An item that says AirDroid Web and that has two selections to either visit AirDroid.com
or and it gives an IP address in the local network.
It goes out and grabs a DACP address.
Mine is for my home network as 192 blah blah blah blah blah and this is important.
Column 48888.
In order to connect the AirDroid and either my file manager, I use Conqueror for my file manager.
Or in a browser you would type that IP address including the port number into the address bar
and then hit enter to connect.
Once you do that, AirDroid will display on your phone a confirmation message and let me do that right now.
And it is 192.168. something.
Top 111. Column 8888.
And an accepted screen pops up on the phone and the image of that screen shows up in your browser or file manager
and you have to touch accept on your phone.
And then you are looking once again at the My Devices screen.
But in your browser you are now looking at a whole nother screen.
On the right hand side of the screen there is a dialogue that tells me what my phone making model is
and how my story space I have available.
And under that a dialogue for transferring information to the phone via drag and drop.
On the left hand side of the screen there is a series of icons messages.
I can click that and look at my text messages and actually send text messages.
I tested that yesterday.
Videos, apps, our logs, I can look at my call logs.
That is something else I attended yesterday.
Contacts, I can look at and edit my contacts on my phone via AirDroid.
And then others and there for various devices.
They are for various directly such as your photos and the photos directly music and the music directly and so on.
There is also a frequent button and let me click on that and we will see what it does.
And it shows the most frequent people I call with my telephone.
Now in order to transfer a podcast to my phone I need to open a separate window.
Caves don't work because the transfer is done by drag and drop.
So I would open a separate window of conqueror pointing to my podcast directory.
Highlight the ones I want to transfer and drag them over and drop them into the upload to dialogue box on the right hand side of the screen.
And they will transfer into whatever directory is selected and the upload to dialogue.
Now at this point what I am looking at right now it says upload to SD.
I don't have my glasses on.
Because they are going to be purer files right before my right in between my bicycles.
Upload to SDC card slash AirDroid slash upload.
Now I want to put them there, I want to put them in my music directory.
So I click the dialogue button to the right of the name of the directory and I get a dialogue for changing the directory.
And I can select any directory that shows under my SD card.
So I select music and then I click OK to the selection dialogue and now it was a set file saving path on Android to SDC card music I click OK.
And anything I drag and drop into that window will go to my music directory.
Now if I have some pictures on the phone that I want to get off the phone and it's enough so that I just if it's just one picture or two I will normally just email it to myself.
But if it's multiple pictures I can go over to the photos item.
I usually use the files item so I can browse the entire file tree because I have pictures in several different locations.
So I click files here.
It opens to the SDC card I go to DCIM which is where pictures I take arise 100 media and I get a dialogue that shows thumbnails of all the pictures.
That I have in the 100 media sub directory.
I can shift click or control click to select more than one picture and then faint in the top right hand corner just under the title bar.
There's a link that says download to transfer the pictures to my computer.
I click download and let's click this picture of this pretty little flower here.
And shortly a dialogue opens up to ask me where I want to save the picture at least it's supposed to.
I have noticed these dialogues sometimes take a little bit to a little bit of time to appear.
I can also write cook and the dialogue says do I want to save it? Do I open it with when views since this is on Slackware or select another?
I can click save as and navigate to the desired target directory on my computer and save the picture.
When I was experimenting with this yesterday I observed that if I transfer one picture it would be transferred simply as the JPEG image.
But if I select to transfer several pictures, AirDroid will zip them up into a zip file and I will need to unzip them to view them on my computer.
A while ago I noticed that when I transferred multiple pictures in the zip format the metadata for the picture were getting trashed and I would be unable to open the picture.
I don't know if other people had that experience but I was having that experience and that issue seems to have been fixed.
I uploaded some pictures to my computer or downloaded them to my computer. I get confused at the direction signs, opened up the zip file and the pictures viewed just fine in greenview.
Just for grins and giggles I'm going to go over and they also viewed this fine in the GIMP because I was editing some of the screenshots that I took so I can make them available with this podcast.
The other things I tested yesterday I can go into a folder here that says apps, this is in the AirDroid interface and list all the applications that I have installed.
There's another item that says camera and when I click on that I can actually control the camera from my computer screen and as this camera has front and back lenses I can actually rotate the lenses.
Now it's pointing at me you certainly don't want to see that. I can rotate the lenses and save a picture. It doesn't look like I can actually take a snapshot.
Again this is not something I've used but if you would be interested in something of this nature you can certainly experiment with it. These are all with the non-cremium item and now it's asking me to save the experimental snapshot that I took.
I think I'm going to open it with the GIMP view and see what it looks like. So clearly I don't I am not like that. I'm not conversant with using this particular feature. I use Primarily the file transfer feature which works very very nicely.
I've also noted that with recent revisions the files for some reason transfer noticeably quicker than they used to which is very nice when I'm copying 5 or 6 podcasts to my phone from my computer.
A couple of questions if you are running Firefox or any browser and you have a no script type plugin you will need to enable scripts to allow a connection to AirDroid.
The other caution is this if you're not using AirDroid, exit the application. If you're walking around your time with AirDroid on it's going to want to grab an IP address from any open Wi-Fi that contacts and this would obviously not be secure.
But given that Google has progressively been making it more and more difficult to mount an Android phone as a file system because they want you to send your stuff to Google Drive I guess.
Personally I prefer not to run naked through the Googleplex. This is a very nice workaround that with minimal effort you can get files back and forth to your computer within the security of your own home land.
I will include in the show notes some links and links to some screenshots and talk at you next time. If you want to reach me you can reach me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net.
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