After buying a Garmin Forerunner recently, I soon realised I would be able to develop apps for it, so I started looking into Garmin’s Connect IQ platform and playing about. Everything was going great until I tried to run one of the sample apps on the watch, at which point I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out how to mount the device as a filesystem on my Mac so I could copy the app across.
After losing some hair, I eventually cobbled together the solution from a couple of half-answers on forums, so I thought I’d share the information here to save others some much-valued time! It’s easy once you know how.
The Problem
Macs don’t like mounting Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) devices. Although macOS supports MTP, when you plug an MTP device into your Mac, it won’t appear in Finder as a drive (like a USB mass storage device would, for example), which is exactly what you need to happen in order to copy something to said device.
The Solution
Firstly, download Android File Transfer. This is a simple MTP client, normally used for browsing through the filesystem on an Android phone, but it works just fine for browsing non-Android MTP devices too.
Now, if you’ve already downloaded Garmin Express (which is likely as it’s probably one of the first things you did after unboxing your watch), ensure it’s not running. Importantly, it’s not enough just to close the application, you need to make sure the Garmin Express Service is stopped. You can do this simply by opening Activity Monitor and ensuring its entry is greyed out, pressing Stop if it’s not:
With Garmin Express now killed, you can plug in your Garmin watch. If it asks you whether you want to “Use MTP (media transfer)?”, select Yes or the equivalent.
Lastly, simply open Android File Transfer, and voilà!
