Why my smartphone shows as usb or exteal drive on my pc

The exact mechanisms depends, but the simple answer is "its the easiest way to expose storage to a PC without additional drivers". In the bad old days, between the simple, bulletproof 'dumb phones' of the past, and mode smart phones, you'd have 'half witted' phones that needed additional drivers and software unique to the phone to do anything. I do believe iPhones need itunes to do anything on it - but I'll leave it to the reader to decide if an iPhone is truely smart or not.

Its worth considering outside Cynogen mod, most mode phones a't mounted as 'hard drives' or 'removable media'. They were once so you could do neat things like boot your PC off a phone, but its problematic. Instead, phones use MTP (which has been used for other devices), which essentially abstracts the storage on the phone so you don't have direct access. Basically your phone tells your PC "I have these files" and your PC tells your phone what operations to do.

Some phones also expose a 'read only' partitions with drivers - especially chinese makes.

So the reasons? Well, it makes it fast and easy to copy media on and off your phone. The mechanism? Typically MTP, tho you can fall back to PTP.

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