iPhone 16 not detecting USB flash drive

Have you tried a powered hub? Have you tried any other thumb drives?

Basic steps include deleting Sandisk app, reinstalling and restarting iPhone. Thumb drive should just appear in side bar of Files app after a short time. Do you have any other USB-C accessories you can try to confirm it’s not a port issue?

Sounds silly, but is your iPhone USB-C port clean?

You may have luck with a powered hub.

Also, what could have changed then to now were iOS updates and compatibility with that specific USB-C flash drive.

Have you recently plugged the drive into another device and confirmed it’s working?

If it’s an older thumb drive it’s possible it’s drawing too much power. Normally, it should trip a notification. Do you have a powered hub you can plug it into and then plug the hub into your iPhone?

have a stick which has usb-c and usb-a port in each end and support 2 sd cards one micro and a slot for normal sd have an adaptor from normal to microSD so it has 2 cards

just tested it with my iphone17pro at at first it did not show up

then I tested with my my ipad pro m2 and they both showed up as untitled drives in the ipad file app

then I put it back in the iphone and it showed up there too.

What is the drive formatted, FAT 32?

Are you using a third party app or the Apple Files app?