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?

  • @ExtremeDullardOP
    3•1 year ago

    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…