Priv USB tether Toggle

I searched and can't seem to find an answer...

What the heck does it do? When I plug in my phone it appears as a device.

However when I toggle USB Tether to "ON" from the menu settings of my phone, my phone disappears from the list of devices on my computer. When I toggle USB tether to "OFF" my phone reappears as a device on my computer

This was causing me all kinds of frustrations!!!

At least until I found the swipe option and used the phone notification to connect my phone for file transfer. I can then swipe down and look at the phone notifications, one of them allows me to change my phone into file transfer mode, I can then see my files hooray!

So USB tether appears useless on my phone, or maybe was useful but now on Android 6.0 it is superfluous???

Very weird. Why would this useless toggle be on my phone and work completely differently than expected????

USB teetering turns your phone into a USB hotspot for your data. Rather than share your data through the wifi hospot it uses the USB.

Hi thanks for the reply. But what does this mean? Sorry can you give an example of this in action? Like if I enable usb tether, how is someone else going to get to my data over presumably wifi hotspot? Do they connect to my wifi hotspot and then what???

Or do I plug my phone into a usb hub and they their phone into the same usb hub and they can see my phone in their file manager???

Hmmm I explored the internet a bit and I think I figured it out. :D

Haha sorry, I was asleep. I guess you figured it out but let me reply anyway since others might wanna know. The usb tethering shares your cellular data only to the USB device it's connected to. You cannot connect it to multiple devices or a hub. It also has to be a PC or a Mac that you connect it to. It predates wifi tethering.. I remember using it on my old Windows Mobile 5.1 device back in 2008. The wifi hotspot is easier to set up and use but it drains battery quite a bit because you have cellular radio and wifi transmission on at the same time. With USB tethering you save a lot of battery and your connection is safer. The downside is that it is much much slower than wifi tethering.