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RcloneExplorer is an Android application that integrates cloud providers using rclone for cloud storage and Android platform interfaces for local storage.
When you open up rcloneExplorer for the first time, rcloneExplorer will ask you import a rclone configuration file (rclone.conf) or create a new one by adding a remote with (+). A "remote" is a single configured cloud location in rclone.
There are various types of remotes and rcloneExplorer supports all storage remotes and most of the meta-remotes like crypt that encrypts other remotes and union that combines multiple remotes. You can see all supported remote types on rclone.org. Note that you can only configure some types inside of the app, but you can always import a configuration to allow more remote types.
Keep in mind that rclone does not supports all features on all remotes (see optional feature matrix)- and for larger file operations, you need both a stable network connection and enough battery.
Feature Quality: Beta, data loss can occur but generally shouldn't.
Starting in Android 10, applications no longer have direct access to user-visible file storage. As a result, rclone can no longer access your files using standard Linux file APIs and your "local" remotes won't be very useful.
Starting in version 1.9.0, rcloneExplorer features a new storage frontend/backend system that uses the Storage Access Framework, an Android 4.4+ system for managing file and file tree-like content. You must enable this feature in Settings> File Access>Enable SAF Client Preview. Then you can add any SAF-accessible storage location using Add Storage.
This will launch the system's file manager, allowing you to grant access to any storage location.
- Select "Add Storage". The system file manager will open.
- Open the left hand drawer ☰. A list of storage locations be shown, depending on whether your system has a hardware SD card or a USB drive attached.
- Select a storage location by tapping the drawer item. Then, tap "SELECT " on the bottom to give rcloneExplorer access to this storage location.
On some devices, not all accessible storage locations are displayed by default. When the system file manager opens, you can tap on the right hand menu: ⋮
And then select "Show internal storage". Afterwards, all storage locations should be visible.
Note that storage provided by third party apps can currently not be correctly read by the internal rclone and is therefore inaccessible.
Full Tree Access (Intent#ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE)
- Android: access Internal Storage, SD cards, USB drives
- exFAT/NTFS for USB by Paragon Software - does not work.
Feature Quality: Preview, data loss is expected!
In addition to to reading local storage via the Storage Access Framework, rcloneExplorer version 1.10.0+ can allow other apps to access files on your cloud remotes from within those apps. You must enable this feature in Settings> File Access>Enable Content Provider Preview. Other apps can then be granted access to cloud files, just like rcloneExplorer uses these interfaces to access local content.
Generally, all apps should be compatible if they have implemented SAF correctly, but the ones below were actually tested.
However, most applications seem to expect only disk-based files and therefore don't work correctly with streamed files like rcloneExplorer provides. Android 8 and above work much better here since we can hook into the system's fuse layer and make even cloud files seem like actual files.
Full Tree Access (Intent#ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE)
Applications that requrest to access the whole rclone file tree. Note that document editing applications are however only really useful if they can both read and write the document file (which is not granted by default from DocumentsUI). For this functionality look in the section on single documents for more details.
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DocumentsUI ("Files" app on Android 10, "Downloads" on previous versions). Unless your file explorer proxies the file to the opening application, you have to use this to get correct permissions for the opening application.
- MediaInfo - worked with mp3, mp4 and mkv
- VLC - worked with mp3, mp4 and mkv
- Microsoft Excel - works: xlsx (readonly)
- Google Docs - works including editing, but you need to select the storage location on the first save. This location can be back on the remote. All further saves will be done automatically.
- Firefox - does not work at all
- Google Fotos - works: png
- Microsoft Word - works: docx (readonly)
- ZArchiver - does not work at all (tested zip, 7z)
- Total Commander - file browsing only, no read/write operations
Open A Single File (Intent#ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT)
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OneDrive - upload stable
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Google Docs purposefully excludes other cloud providers by passing LOCAL_ONLY. By default, rcloneExplorer will claim to be LOCAL_ONLY to show up when docs requests a file. You disable this behaviour in the settings. Apart from this however, Docs works very well with the rclone provider and can open, edit and save files on any remote seamlessly, as long as the file sizes are reasonable.
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Opening, editing and saving of documents works fine with reasonable file sizes.
Create A Single File (Intent#ACTION_CREATE_DOCUMENT)
- (none)
Search functionality is currently very basic. It will perform a case-insensitive contains-operation on known file paths for a remote, i.e. you can only search folders that are you have browsed before in that session which have not yet been evicted from the cache due to low ram.
If there is enough user demand other solutions might be implemented in the future, e.g. an offline index cache or similar solutions. Note however that indexing operations can be expensive in terms of api quotas (or just simply if you pay per api call) and would have to be performed regularly to pick up changes.