Modern smartphones sometimes try so hard to keep their computer roots a secret. Despite powerful processors, buckets of memory, and a litany of connectivity options, these devices often go out of their way to distance themselves from their very, very close desktop and laptop relatives. More often than not, that means a layer of user interface abstraction, where our interactions with the phone are a few steps removed from the bits moving around within – and a lot of the time that spells keeping users as far away from the phone’s file system as possible. While third-party apps have been available to pick up the slack (at least where the OS allows), finding official file manager support on smartphones has been a tricky proposition. Last year, we saw Microsoft step up to the task with its release of Files, and now it looks like Google has finally come around as well, baking a file manager into the new Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
While not one of the release’s most advertised features by a long shot, it turns out that there really is a basic file manager integrated into Marshmallow, tucked away within system settings. To access it, you pull up the settings page for storage and USB options, where you’ll find a new “Explore” feature – tap that, and you can start poking around the phone’s files.
Mind you, it’s not the most full-featured file manager ever constructed, and third-party utilities already offer much more rich feature sets, but it’s still a small milestone all the same that Google’s even giving users this level of control over the files on their phones and tablets. If you’ve already upgraded to Marshmallow on your Nexus handset, give it a try for yourself.
Source: Phandroid
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