How to Browse Your Files, iCloud Drive and External Drives From Your iPhone or iPad

Set the display up first with the connection guide.

The two kinds of location

Open Files from the dock. The sidebar has two sections, and the difference matters:

• App Locations, App Files, Downloads, Images, Desktop and Trash. These belong to XeOS itself. Downloads is where the browser puts things; Desktop is what you see behind your windows.
• Your device's locations, folders you've mounted. This is where iCloud Drive, a folder on your phone, and any external drive appear.

Mounting a folder

Click Add Folder at the bottom of the sidebar (or right-click anywhere in the sidebar and choose Add Folder).

The iOS document picker opens. Navigate to the folder you want and choose it. XeOS works out what kind of folder it is and gives it a matching icon: a cloud for iCloud Drive, a drive glyph for an external disk, a plain folder for local storage. The folder then stays available across restarts, you grant access once.

Mounting an iCloud Drive folder

In the picker, go to iCloud Drive and pick the folder you want, Documents, a project folder, whatever you actually use. It appears in the sidebar with a cloud icon and you can work in it directly: open a file, edit it, save it, and the change syncs back through iCloud the way it would from a Mac.

Files that haven't been downloaded from iCloud yet still appear in the listing, and are fetched automatically when you open them, so a folder that's mostly still in the cloud looks and behaves like a normal folder.

Mounting a folder from your phone

Same flow: pick a folder under On My iPhone (or On My iPad). Anything another app has saved there, a scanner app's output, files another app shares, becomes browsable and openable.

Mounting an external drive

Plug a USB drive or SSD into your adapter's USB port. It appears in the iOS document picker under Locations, and mounting it works exactly like mounting anything else.

If the drive is unplugged later, XeOS marks the location unavailable rather than losing it, with a Check Again action so you can reconnect and carry on.

Hardware worth having

A drive needs a port, and video needs a port. On a phone with one connector, that means a hub. What to look for:

• HDMI out, for the display.
• USB-A or USB-C data port, for the drive.
• Power pass-through, so the phone charges while it's driving a screen and a disk, which it will otherwise not do for long.

These are usually sold as "USB-C multiport adapters" or "USB-C hubs with power delivery". Bus-powered SSDs work well; large spinning drives may need their own power supply, since a phone supplies limited current.

Working with what you've mounted

Once a location is in the sidebar it behaves like any other folder:

• Open files in place, double-click a PDF, image, video, text file or Office document and the right viewer opens.
• Drag and drop between windows to copy or move, with a progress bar for large transfers.
• Right-click for rename, duplicate, compress, unzip, delete and more.
• Zip and unzip without any extra tool, double-clicking a .zip extracts it in place.
• Slideshow any folder of images (see the slideshow guide).
• Search across mounted locations with the system search overlay.

Tidying up the sidebar

Right-click any mounted location for its options:

• Customize Folder, give it a clearer name, a different icon and a colour. Useful when you have three mounts that all say "Documents".
• Pin to Dock, put the folder in the dock so it's one click from anywhere.
• Remove, take it out of the sidebar. The folder itself is untouched.

You can also drag locations to reorder them, and drag a folder from the file list onto the sidebar to pin it.