1y ago

Greyed out USB preferences (not a bad cable)

Hey everybody,

I installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on an old cellphone I had lying around. It works fine, apart from an odd problem: when I connect the phone to my computer by USB, the "Charging this device via USB" notification appears but all the USB preference options are greyed out.

Data transfer works however: if I go into System > Developer options > Default USB configuration, set it to Data Transfer, unplug the USB cable and plug it back in, the options are still greyed out, but File Transfer is selected and the drive appears on the PC. So it's not the cable, and my ports or plugs don't need cleaning.

It's very inconvenient to have to enable and disable this in the Developer options each time I want to transfer a file, and I most certainly don't want to leave Data tranfer enabled all the time.

I've been looking for a solution everywhere, and it seems plenty of people have the same problem with a lot of different phones, but nobody has a solution.

Anybody knows what might be going on here? Any adb shell command I could issue to reenable what might be disabled?

15 comments

You said it's not the cable but I personally have ran into the issue when working with a cheap cable that is designed for charging only. Prob not the solution to your problem but I figured peeps will read your post and maybe that will be the solution for a similar problem.
- Well it isn’t: when I enable File Transfer by default in the Developer option, it works fine. I can copy files to/from the phone. And USB debugging works fine too. It’s just that the options are greyed out in the menu.
  But for good measure, I did try 3 or 4 other cables I had lying around, and my other USB ports, and the problem doesn’t go away.
  
  well was it an ankor cable if not then the cable could've been overpriced

Yesterday I had to switch between 3 cables before I found one where USB transfer worked.
- Data transfer does work. It's just that I can't enable it using the notification menu thing.
  
  Fair enough, hope you find a solution.

This may be a "safety" measure in the bios of the phone itself that was triggered when you flashed the rom. Can you try to flash back to stock android and see if that works? (Tho, depending on the manufacturer, that may be a bridge already burned.) Also, it could be that android 13 dropped driver support for the phone in question and no longer "officially" supports it, so some options are grayed out unless you enable them in developer options. Probably not much help for you, but that's the best I can think of.
- I would try it, but it took me several hours of trying just about everything to finally manage to flash this (unofficial) LineageOS ROM onto the phone, I almost bricked the phone several times until it finally worked and installed properly at some point, and I'm not sure what I did exactly to make it work.
  I don't really want to ruin the installation at this point :) I'm not sure I'll be able to re-flash the stock Nokia ROM again safely, and I'm certainly not sure I'll be able to return back to LineageOS. I think I only got lucky once with that one.
  But I don't need to do that: I used that phone for a very long time with the stock Nokia ROM and it worked fine.
  I've been reading reports of this problem also happening in other brands of phones with the stock ROM also. Like this one for example: the guy has the problem with a stock Redmi phone and solved it by installing a custom ROM. Kind of the reverse of my experience :)
  I think maybe it has something to do with latter revisions of Android: the last Nokia ROM my phone ran was Android 10. This LineageOS ROM is Android 13. I have a feeling the Android version number is the clincher here.
  I thought perhaps Google in their infinite wisdom unilateraly decided to disable something useful in AOSP like they usually do, and perhaps there was some adb trick to bring the usefulness back. Hence my initial question. But come to think of it, my Fairphone 4 running CalyxOS is also Android 13 and it works perfectly fine. So maybe not...

Wouldn't this just be the default android safety feature that disabled data transfer via cable by default now? You need to enable it each time, and I know testing my phone on Android 13, it prompts me when I plug into my PC via push notification, maybe lineage doesn't do that
- LineageOS 20 for me does that and works normally if my phone port isnt acting up, i don't need to enable developer options for file transfers like op does.
- Wouldn’t this just be the default android safety feature that disabled data transfer via cable by default now? You need to enable it each time
  Yes, disabled by default and having to enable it each time is exactly what I want! But I can't because the options are greyed out, is my problem :)

Maybe the problem is on your computer's end. Have you tried updating adb drivers and device-specific drivers (if any)? I've run into some issues with old adb drivers being present on the computer I was connecting to, even if the connection shouldn't have been going through adb in the first place. But some identifier was acting up and causing misidentification of the device.
- I use Linux. There is no driver to install. But I just tried on my wife's Windows PC, which doesn't have any Android tools installed, and it's the same thing: all USB options are greyed out.

Did you ever figure this out? I'm having the same issue trying to connect a Nokia G60 with stock Android One ROM to two macs. Though only most of the time; rarely it just works.
- No. Sadly I never found out why my phone is misbehaving. But this isn't my primary device: it's just a test cellphone so it doesn't matter too much to me. It would certainly be a showstopper if it was my daily driver.

15 comments