Greyed out USB preferences (not a bad cable)

ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org to Android@lemmy.world – 41 points –

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?

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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.