Here’s how to access your Android phone’s files from the new Linux Terminal

Android makes its downloads folder available to the Linux VM, but unfortunately other files aren’t available

Mar 22, 2025 - 13:57

Here’s how to access your Android phone’s files from the new Linux Terminal

Here’s a quick guide on how to access files from your Android device while using the new Linux Terminal app.
The Terminal app connects to an isolated instance of Debian running in a virtual machine, so it only has access to whatever files the Android host shares with it.
Android shares its downloads folder with the Linux VM, which can access those files under the /mnt/shared path.

With the second quarterly release of Android 15, Google introduced a powerful new Linux Terminal app. Google’s Terminal app is not like other terminal emulators on the app store as it actually connects to a full-fledged instance of Debian in a virtual machine. This instance of Debian is isolated from the host Android OS, and it’s only able to access what the host gives it. That includes files on your Android device, but fortunately, there’s a way to access your Android device’s files from the new Linux Terminal.

To access files from your Android phone within the Linux Terminal environment, you have to place those files in Android’s Downloads directory. Then, those same files can be accessed within the Linux VM through the /mnt/shared directory path. You can utilize a variety of Linux commands to interact with these files, including basic commands like ls for listing directory contents and cat for displaying file contents.