Every phone ships with a file manager. Almost every phone’s file manager is designed to hide the file system from you — as if directories are a shameful thing best not discussed. Solid Explorer takes the opposite view: files are objects you have every right to see, move, rename, and combine. If you have ever needed a real file manager on Android, this is the one.
What Solid Explorer does
The core is a two-pane file browser. On a phone in portrait mode you see one pane and swipe left or right to reach the other. On a phone in landscape, or on a tablet, both panes are side by side. This is deceptively powerful: copying a folder from your Downloads to a specific music folder is now a genuine drag rather than a “select, copy, navigate away, navigate back, paste” ritual.
Everywhere else, Solid Explorer looks like a well-designed native Android app. Material Design theming, colour options, dark mode, light mode. Nothing feels dated. Nothing is trying to sell you something inside the app.
Cloud accounts
One of the reasons power users move to Solid Explorer: it treats Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, Mega, Nextcloud, and around a dozen other cloud services as ordinary file locations. Add an account and you can browse it, move files in and out of it, rename, or bulk-copy — all with the same interface as your local storage.
If you have ever wanted to move a folder from Dropbox to Google Drive without downloading it to your phone and re-uploading it, Solid Explorer does that directly.
Archive handling
Zip, 7z, rar (read), tar, gz — Solid Explorer creates and extracts all of them without a separate app. It can browse the contents of an archive without extracting the whole thing. It can create a password-protected archive with AES-256. This last one is genuinely useful — a set of documents you want to email but not entirely trust to the recipient’s inbox goes into a password-protected 7z in about 30 seconds.
SFTP, SMB, WebDAV, FTP
Every network protocol that used to require a specialist app is built in. Point Solid Explorer at your home NAS, at a work SMB share, or at your web host via SFTP, and it looks and behaves like a local folder. On a good Wi-Fi network you can stream video from a NAS directly from the file listing.
Root and USB storage
If your phone is rooted, Solid Explorer offers a full root file browser as a separate pane. If you plug in a USB flash drive or an SSD via a USB-C adapter, the drive appears in the storage list — and the app treats it identically to internal storage.
What it costs
Solid Explorer is a paid app after a 14-day trial. The one-time price is low (comparable to a coffee), no subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no ads. This is by design and part of why it stays on our phones.
Where it falls short
Two things I would like it to do better:
- Bulk rename. Solid Explorer’s bulk rename tool is functional but not as flexible as a desktop file manager’s. Regex support exists but is buried.
- Search across cloud accounts. Local search is instant. Search inside a cloud account has to hit the cloud service, and some services are slow to answer. This is a limitation of the services, not really Solid Explorer’s fault, but it is something to know before you rely on it.
Who should install it
Install Solid Explorer if you have ever wanted to move files around your phone without fighting the system; if you use two or more cloud storage services; if you plug in USB storage or a NAS; or if archives (zip, 7z, tar) are part of your workflow.
Skip it if the stock Files app has never let you down. Solid Explorer is aimed at people who have felt the limits of the default.
The verdict
5 / 5. There is no better paid file manager on Android. If you fit its user profile, it pays back the small purchase price the first week.
Where to get it: the official Solid Explorer listing on the Google Play Store.