the best android ftp server app

Hooking up your Android phone with a USB cable to your computer is so cumbersome isn’t it? So with that WiFi network you have around the house you might as well fire up a FTP server and transfer your files using FileZilla or WinSCP right?

Of course! But what android FTP server app is good, stable and free to use?
Well I’ve tried a few and I have to say there are a lot of shitty ones out there. Some of them are free as long as you don’t transfer files bigger than 10 or 50MB (boooooh!!), some of them get in trouble when transfer speeds get “high” and crash or loose their connections (booooh!!) and some of them are just too cumbersome to set up (booooh!!)

But I wouldn’t be blogging about it if I didn’t find a pretty damn good one in the bunch. In fact, this one isn’t just a FTP app. ES File Explorer is a darn good file explorer app for your Android phone packed with some extra handy features such as a remote access module, which basically sets up a FTP server on your phone.

The cool part is once you’ve configured it, you can have it drop a shortcut on your home screen to start-up that FTP server with a single tap next time.
It’s awesome and so far it’s stable as a rock. I throw big bunches of large files at it with WinSCP and it takes everything with a smile.

So if you’re looking for a good FTP server for android device, check out ES File Explorer.
It’s also a really good file explorer, can access a bunch of cloud services, uninstall apps, check battery and running apps and much more. In short, this is a good tool to have on your geeky Android tool belt. I imagine it to be a bit like the one Batman has, but with one of those green robots as a belt buckle.

Note: FTP is kinda flaky on android to transfer files sometimes, so recently I tend to use Bittorrent Sync for easy and trouble-free file transfers from and to my phone. However, FTP can still be a quick and dirty way to get files transferred without having to install the BTSync client.

Photo by John Trainor, cc-licensed.