Seems like both Dropbox and Google Drive has a pretty sad implementation/bug that acquire exclusive access to USB devices that expose MTP (media transfer protocol). The way google and dropbox did it is just wrong as they 1) should ask for permission for reading data on new devices, 2) not open the usb device in exclusive mode... 3) make use of MTP's Multi-Session mode. Well, as it will take them about 4.5 years to correct this, I wonder if there is a way for a app-store/user-space application in macOS 11/12/13 (big sur, monterey, ventura) to do the following: Detect if there is another app that has exclusive lock to a specific usb device Get the name of the app so that an alert could say, "please quit google-drive for this to work..." Release the exclusive lock, i.e. hand over the usb peripheral to my application