As the title implies, I cannot seem to find a way to enable file manager apps on Android to properly write to external SD storage on Marshmallow. Specifically, I have a USB-C 3.1 flash drive that I want to write to but am stuck only being able to read from it ><
Hmm, this is very peculiar. I would run through all the obvious stuff of course, make sure it's FAT32, and maybe let Android format it. I remember a specific issue in Android's past where it wouldn't be able to write to drives without a title. Weird I know.
Beyond that give a few different file explorers a try, my favorite is Solid Explorer.
It's not a bug regarding specific formatting or anything, it is part of Android's rather wishy-washy external SD card support; KitKat, they cut writing to it for storage; Lollipop they cut moving apps to it; now with Marshmallow, they brought back some sort of support which considers the external card as internal memory, but I cannot seem to even make this flash drive work that way :/
Aha! I found out how one is supposed to be able to use external drives for storage.
So write access to a drive is not actually enabled through settings or device policy but rather in the settings of the app itself where it then basically asks the system for access to write to the selected external sd (not a general access to all storage but per storage device).
A bit odd and unintuitive really, but there you go if anyone else was having similar issues.
Cool, glad you got it figured out. Yea, they've done a lot of changes on how android handles external devices with the last few iterations. Not necessarily for the better.