It’s been a long time since my laptop could print to any printer, anywhere. Why are ios and Android so limited in their print capabilities? You need the right printer, or the right app… I feel like it’s 1992 all over again. Is there some technical limitation I don’t know about?
In: Technology
The simple truth is that the world has yet to see two printer manufacturers that have been capable of even convincingly pretending that their shit work the same way as the other company’s product.
Every single one of them reinvents the wheel. Again. And again. And again.
The only reason that your computer can easily handle nearly any printer you can find in your office is that Windows (for example) has a library of several thousand different printers that it can somewhat reliably identify and pick the right driver to communicate with.
Printers are a mess, and that’s not even close to an exaggeration.
Apple has made an attempt to simplify that shit some and has made up a (read: their own) protocol for wireless printer capabilities from phones and tablets.
Google has made attempts to simplify that shit some and has made up (read: their own) protocol for wireless printer capabilities from phones and tablets.
Which means that just like with car entertainment systems that have to support two entirely different phone standards to get phone-powered maps on the infotainment screen, printers too have to support two entirely different standards to allow printing form all types of phones. Awesome, isn’t it?
Printers are the Satan of everyday IT infrastructure. Every manufacturer slips in some proprietary BS that only works with their specific driver, then that driver doesn’t make it into Android or iOS versions because they can’t afford to have half a gig of just printer drivers. Even on PC you usually have to install the driver from a CD/manufacturer website to properly use the printer, or if you’re lucky the printer manufacturer sent the driver to Microsoft so Win10 can automatically download it.
On android you have to manually install the printer driver, which due to how mobile OSes work, is always done through an app.
Latest Answers