Linking a USB stick to your Android device may look a bit awkward, but it can be very useful. You need this to use a USB stick on an Android smartphone.
Connect the USB stick to telephone
The internal storage space of telephones is fortunately still growing, but it is not always enough. And not every Android smartphone offers space for a microSD card. In such cases, connecting a USB stick to your phone is a great alternative.
Your Android smartphone probably has a USB-C or micro-USB connection. But that may be called USB, you cannot just connect a much larger USB sticks to it. You first need a special cable for this.
Such a cable is called a USB-otg cable. OTG stands for on the go, because you no longer need a larger device such as a laptop or desktop PC to connect your USB sticks. You can order such a USB-otg cable online for a few euros.
Check whether the USB stick works
Unfortunately, just such a cable is not enough to make the USB sticks work. Your Android smartphone must also support this form of external storage. Most new phones that work on modern versions of Android just do that, but if you have an older device it may not work.
Fortunately, there are several apps with which you can quickly check whether you can connect a USB stick to your Android smartphone, such as USB OTG Checker. That app shows with a check mark or across if you can connect a USB stick to your phone.
Read data on the USB stick
You can now connect the USB sticks to your smartphone, but then the question is whether your phone can also do something with what it says. The USB sticks must be formatted to the FAT32 file system (exFAT also works on certain devices). If that is not the case, then you cannot transfer files to your phone, for example.
If everything is properly connected and set up, a message will appear on your screen when the USB stick is connected with the name of the USB stick and the option to view all files. You can then copy it to your phone or open it from the USB sticks if, for example, you want to watch a number of videos. That way you don’t need a computer to put files on your phone.