Old favorite Android file management program ES File Explorer has been getting a lot of bad press lately. Reviewers feel the latest versions betray feature bloat, and decry the introduction of a paid version that charges you chiefly for removing that bloat. And as it happens, I’ve been having file management problems of my own on my $50 Kindle Fire. Those problems are now fixed. No thanks to ES File Explorer.

For some time, I had difficuties copying downloaded files on my $50 Fire over to the microSD card. As some commenters remarked, that could have been just file permissions problems that I could have managed in Windows or elsewhere in ES File Explorer. But I wasn’t able to find a way to do so, even in this supposedly feature-rich app.

Instead, I downloaded one of the recommended alternative free apps – File Expert HD. This one was particularly praised for providing full access to external storage on Android devices that had had this feature crocked in more recent versions of the OS. So I installed it, and the first thing it asked me on opening was to give permission to access the microSD card. With that done, I swapped the EPUB book files from the Download folder on my Fire’s internal memory to the Books folder on my microSD card. They copied straight over, no problem.

Needless to say, File Expert HD now has pride of place on my Fire’s Home screen, and ES File Explorer has been uninstalled. And as said, this could be my own ineptitude managing the software. But it does chime with what the reviewers have been saying. And I’m happy with the result.

 

1 COMMENT

  1. I’ve had a different problem with ES File Explorer on my new Fire tablet. When I ran the “clean” function to remove a deleted directory, two of my apps wouldn’t run until I uninstalled and reinstalled them. One of them was FBReader (sideloaded), the other was “VLC for Fire.”

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