In my books, I recommend that when you copy a file from a computer to your phone that you place it into the Downloads folder. That’s good advice, but don’t expect the Downloads app to find the file.

Using the Downloads app to locate a file in the Downloads folder makes a lot of sense. After all, when you copy something from another location to your phone or tablet, you’re downloading that item. Whether you used your Android to copy the file or manually copied it should make no difference. In theory.

In Figure 1, you see two screenshots side-by-side. The first shows the contents of the Downloads app and the second shows the contents of the Downloads folder as viewed by a file management app.

Figure 1. Files here but not there.

I copied the file Statement_201412.pdf to the phone. The other files shown in both screenshots were downloaded by using the web browser app. You can see that the file I copied manually doesn’t show up on the right, in the Downloads app.

My theory is that the Downloads app uses an index to record which files you download. So when you use the web browser app to download a PDF, image, or other file, that file is indexed and presented in the Downloads app. This indexing doesn’t take place when you manually copy a file to the Downloads folder. Therefore, the Downloads app doesn’t see it, even though the file exists.

To further test this theory, I used the file manager app to remove a JPG file from the Downloads folder. The file is shown at the top right in Figure 1. You see that the file is missing on the right side of the screen, so it doesn’t exist in the folder (or anywhere else). Because the file was physically deleted elsewhere, the Downloads app index wasn’t updated, so it still shows up in that app.

I’m just guessing as to the internal operations of the Downloads app. Without hacking into Android, I’ll never know how it works for certain. I’ve been unable to find a Refresh action for the Downloads app, so at this point my advice is still to copy files to your phone or tablet and settle them into the Downloads folder. When use a file management app to access those files. That approach always works.

Samsung devices come with a My Files app. If your phone or tablet lacks a file management app, you can choose one of several available at the Play Store. I recommend ASTRO in my books. Many of the Android community are unhappy with that app, but for me it works well.