Open Mac drives on Android.

Android ships without an APFS or HFS+ driver. Those are the formats macOS uses for nearly every external drive it formats, and the operating system simply does not support them. Plugging one in usually produces a "corrupt or unsupported" notification, or the drive is ignored entirely. APFS Reader carries its own APFS and HFS+ engines and its own USB mass-storage stack, so it reads the drive itself rather than waiting for Android to do it.

APFS is the modern Apple filesystem, standard since macOS High Sierra in 2017. HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) is its predecessor and is still common on older external drives and Time Machine disks. APFS Reader reads both, including journaled HFS+ volumes.

No. APFS Reader talks to the drive through Android’s standard USB host API, entirely in user space. Nothing is mounted at the system level, so there is no root, no custom kernel, no unlocked bootloader and no ADB setup involved.

No. Everything happens on the phone or tablet. You do not need a Mac to mount, unlock or read the drive - that is the whole point.

The app is free to install, and reading is free on every supported format - APFS, HFS+ and FileVault-encrypted volumes included. Full read and write on exFAT and FAT32 is also free. Writing to APFS, HFS+ and Linux (ext2/3/4) drives is the one paid capability: it unlocks with a single one-time in-app purchase, with no subscription and no second app to install. There are no ads at any tier.

Reading is free. Writing to APFS and HFS+ unlocks with the one-time in-app purchase, after which you can create folders, rename, move, delete, and copy or upload files onto Mac drives and SSDs in place. The same unlock covers writing back to an unlocked FileVault volume, and to Linux ext2, ext3 and ext4 drives, with no extra purchase.

Yes. Unlock the volume with its password or personal recovery key and browse it like any other drive, with no Mac needed. The encrypted volume is APFS inside. Reading is free; write-back uses the same one-time unlock as any other APFS drive.

Yes. ext2, ext3 and ext4 drives open like any other - a Linux PC’s external drive, a Raspberry Pi card or a Steam Deck microSD card in a USB card reader - and reading them is free. Writing to them uses the same one-time unlock as APFS and HFS+, and follows Linux’s own rules, journal included, so a drive pulled out mid-copy comes back the way Linux would leave it. LUKS1 and LUKS2 drives, the kind an encrypted Ubuntu or Fedora install makes, unlock with their password or key file and open the ext2/3/4, exFAT or FAT32 volume inside. LVM volumes open too, LVM inside LUKS included. Unlocking a LUKS drive can take up to a minute on a slower phone, because Linux makes password checks slow on purpose. A drive Linux did not eject cleanly is shown the way Linux will show it after its own recovery, without the app writing to it.

A phone or tablet running Android 8.0 or newer that supports USB OTG (USB host mode), and a way to connect the drive: plug a USB-C drive in directly, or use a USB-OTG adapter for USB-A drives. Large bus-powered hard drives sometimes need a powered hub, since phones supply limited current.

Through a USB card reader, yes - an SD or microSD card in a reader appears just like any other USB drive, with free read and write on exFAT and FAT32. It does not use your phone’s built-in SD card slot for this; that slot is handled by Android itself, and APFS Reader can browse it through its phone storage view.

Changes are committed atomically, so an interrupted write leaves the drive in a recoverable state rather than silently corrupted. The next Mac that sees it runs its normal repair pass - Disk Utility, or fsck_apfs and fsck_hfs from the command line. As with any write to any filesystem, keep a current backup of anything you cannot lose.

Yes to both. Drives above 2 TB work, and multi-partition drives are enumerated so you can pick the volume you want.

No. There are no ads, no analytics, no crash reporting SDKs and no account system, and nothing about your files, file names, folders or drives is ever transmitted. The app’s only network use is Google Play Billing, for the optional one-time purchase, plus Google’s optional "rate this app" prompt - both handled by the Play Store app on your device.

Nowhere. The password, personal recovery key or key file you use is held in memory only, on your device, and used to decrypt the drive for that session. It is never transmitted, and never written to disk unless you choose to have the app remember it (Settings > Encrypted drives > Remember drive passwords, off by default). A remembered password stays on your device, encrypted with a key held in Android’s Keystore, so the drive unlocks without retyping next time; you can require your fingerprint or face before it is used, and turning the setting off deletes it.

No - that is NTFS Reader, a separate app for Windows-formatted drives, covering NTFS and BitLocker To Go. Between them the two apps handle the full Windows, Mac and exFAT/FAT32 matrix, and both open Linux drives.

Android 8.0 (API 26) and newer, on phones and tablets. The app targets Android 16 (API 36).