We all have been through this tough battle at least once in our lives with MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), which is what every OS uses when you plug an Android phone in via USB. It was designed in 2008 for portable media players and transfers file metadata one item at a time with no caching or parallel requests. It does a round trip every time new info is needed because it works as a request-response protocol, so when you club this with modern tech with 100s of GBs of storage and tens of thousands of files, even calculating folder sizes takes several minutes, and if you are on macOS, the Finder app doesn't even show folder sizes at all. SocketSweep is an open source desktop app that bypasses this agonising MTP entirely. The main source of architectural inspiration is the scrcpy project by Genymobile, the idea of pushing a native binary to an Android device via ADB and communicating over a local socket.
So here's how it works: we have a cross-compiled C++ daemon (~1MB static binary, built with the Android NDK for aarch64) that gets pushed to the phone via adb push. Now the transferred daemon binds to a TCP socket on port 5050 and scans the filesystem using native POSIX calls like opendir/readdir/stat directly on the device, so there's no MTP bottleneck, it's plain raw system calls. Now the ADB port forwarding tunnels TCP 5050 on the phone to localhost:5050 on the PC, giving us a reliable bidirectional channel through the USB cable (with future scope of making it work over WiFi). Coming to the desktop side, we have a Rust/Tauri backend on the PC which manages the full lifecycle from pushing the daemon, setting up port forwarding, handling scoped storage permissions, and managing the TCP connection. The app uses a React frontend with an interactive treemap visualization.
A full /sdcard scan on my device, which is a Samsung S24 Ultra (256GB, ~47k files), took about 7 seconds.
In this lightning talk i'll walk through why MTP is slow at the protocol level, how the "push binary + socket" pattern from scrcpy can be applied to other problems, cross-compiling C++ for Android with the NDK, and how ADB port forwarding works as a communication layer.
