How I reverse engineered Kies and SideSync and fixed MTP

When plugging in my Samsung phone to Mac OS X after installing SideSync, Android File Transfer wasn’t working. At first I didn’t realize what was what was causing the issue and used SideSync to transfer files, but it was buggy. Connections were intermittent and the phone couldn’t be used while files were transferring.

Today, I thought to myself — why must I use Samsung’s own tool to do transfers? I wanted to use the Android File Transfer tool, which worked with all Android devices, and previously worked with my Samsung device… I did some digging around after plugging in my phone via

kextstat | grep -v com.apple

kextstat lists all loaded kernel modules. Here is what I found:

Samsung Drivers which prevented Android File Transfer from working

Samsung installed 4 drivers on my system when I installed SideSync, and Samsung actually installs these drivers with both Kies and SideSync. So I ran the following command:

sudo kextunload -b “com.devguru.driver.SamsungComposite” -v 5 && sudo kextunload -b “com.devguru.driver.SamsungACMData” -v 5 && sudo kextunload -b “com.devguru.driver.SamsungMTP” -v 5 && sudo kextunload -b “com.devguru.driver.SamsungACMControl” -v 5

and then rebooted. After rerunning, I noticed the drivers came back. I had already removed SideSync, so I wasn’t sure why this was happening. I ran:

kextfind -s -b “com.devguru”

And I saw the following:

Lingering Samsung Kernel Extention Files

Hmm, let’s disable ssuddrv and all that it contains.

sudo kextunload -b /System/Library/Extentions/ssuddrv.kext -v 5

And then let’s remove the kext:

rm -rf /System/Library/Extentions/ssuddrv.kext

Another reboot, and finally, after plugging in my phone…

It works!

I designed a shell script to perform these tasks for anyone running into these issues, you can download from my GitHub here, mark it as executable, and run it!

I hope you learned something from this post. If you wish to reach out to me, send me an email at farazfazli@gmail.com