What is the Android phone MTP mount point in (K)ubuntu 20.04 if not /run/user/1000/gvfs?

Solution 1:

Under the Reddit/KDE post MTP mount location for Android phones under Plasma:

Dolphin doesn't mount locations, it accesses them via separate KIO processes. This avoids blocking UI applications. I haven't checked if simple-mtpfs uses FUSE to mount MTP, but if it does, it is indeed the solution you are looking for.

According to https://github.com/phatina/simple-mtpfs:

SIMPLE-MTPFS (Simple Media Transfer Protocol FileSystem) is a file system for Linux (and other operating systems with a FUSE implementation, such as Mac OS X or FreeBSD) capable of operating on files on MTP devices attached via USB to local machine. On the local computer where the SIMPLE-MTPFS is mounted, the implementation makes use of the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) kernel module. The practical effect of this is that the end user can seamlessly interact with MTP device files."*

I have posted as an answer what initially was posted as an update: the fact that there is no mountpoint because there is no mount procedure when accessing Android drive in Plasma. Not all "locations" are accessed in this way, external drives are mounted as expected, but Android locations are accessed in this particular way.

A big consequence is that other file managers cannot access an Android location as Dolphin does or as they do in other desktop environments.

Some other odd behavior can be noticed:

• When opening a file from the Android drive (accessed through Dolphin) the file is copied to the local drive (that is to ~/.cache/kioexec/krun/) before being opened.

• If - after waiting for the copy to ~./cache to finish and for the opening of the file - one decides to copy the file manually to the computer, even if that is done on the $HOME partition (that is the same partition as that of the automatic copy-to-cache), instead of just moving that file from ~/.cache/kioexec/krun/ to the paste location, it is copied for a second time from the Android drive.

• While during the automatic copying to cache Dolphin shows normally the transfer progress in notifications, during manual copy/paste there is no notification progress shown, as if the transfer was instantaneous. (One would expect that to be the case if the paste was on the same partition as the ~/.cache location, and thus a simple move action from there was to be made; but no: the copying is done again from Android, only without notification).

The android drive is thus not mounted automatically, but it can be mounted manually, for example as said said HERE.