Printing Moved to the Phone: From the Printer Driver to Smart Printer

The printer used to belong to the computer

In the archive's account of early computer printing, output arrived a line at a time on continuous fan-fold paper. The printers that produced it were part of one computer's installation. The personal computer shrank the arrangement without changing its logic. A printer sat within a cable's length of one machine, and that machine was the one that printed. The archive's history of office printing before Wi-Fi describes the consequence plainly: printing was a located, wired activity, and the office's layout decided who could print what.

The cable was the visible tie. The invisible one was the driver. Printers spoke different command languages and offered different features, so the computer needed software that could translate a page into what one particular model expected. Microsoft's documentation describes the two halves of that software precisely: a rendering component that converts an application's graphics commands into the data format the printer uses, and a configuration component that lets people control the printer's options. The archive's guide to how printer drivers work explains why that software sat between applications and the printer, and what changed when printing went driver-free.

The result was a burden carried by every pairing of operating system and printer. Historically, each printer model needed its own support on each system, whether a PostScript description file with filters, a Windows minidriver or a vendor's own binary. For a desktop computer that was an installation step. For anything small and portable it was a wall.

The network made the printer a shared service

Networks loosened the cable first. The Berkeley line printer daemon protocol let a computer hand a job to a spooler on another machine; when RFC 1179 documented it in August 1990, it recorded existing practice rather than defining something new. HP's JetDirect cards and boxes then let a printer join the network as a node of its own, and sending raw data to TCP port 9100 became a de facto convention.

In larger organisations a print server held the queues and the drivers for a whole floor, and in the archive's history of print servers in large offices its purpose shifts with scale from sharing a device to governing a fleet. But the network did not change what a printer was. It made the printer reachable from many desks, while every computer that used it, or the server standing in for them, still had to know the model at the other end. The printer was shared. It was not yet self-describing.

The driver became less visible

The protocol that would change this arrived years before phones made use of it. The Printer Working Group dates its Internet Printing Protocol project to November 1996, and IPP/1.1 was issued as an IETF Proposed Standard in September 2000. IPP runs over HTTP, and it lets a client ask a printer about its capabilities as well as send it a job. The archive's history of mobile printing puts the consequence in one sentence: by the autumn of 2000 there was a published way to submit a print job across a network without installing anything specific to the printer at the far end. The common page formats every printer would have to accept came only later.

Discovery supplied the other half. Apple brought automatic discovery to IP networks in 2002 as Rendezvous, later renamed Bonjour; the IETF's own account of DNS-Based Service Discovery traces the idea to running AppleTalk's name-binding protocol over IP. Multicast DNS and DNS-Based Service Discovery were published as IETF Proposed Standards in February 2013. Together they let a device find the printers on its local network without anyone typing an address. As the archive's page on Bonjour printing puts it, discovery is the find-it half of the story, and IPP with the agreed page formats is the send-it half.

What had been missing was a requirement. AirPrint, which reached iPhone and iPad users with iOS 4.2 on 22 November 2010, did not invent driverless printing; the archive's entry on AirPrint describes Apple's feature as submitting jobs over a local network with IPP and Bonjour, without printer-specific drivers. What it added was obligation. In the archive's reading, what shipped was IPP submission, Bonjour discovery and a mandatory raster fallback: a compulsory profile over a ten-year-old standard, backed by the ubiquity of the operating system. The Printer Working Group followed with IPP Everywhere in January 2013, a vendor-neutral version of the same idea.

Android took a different route. In 2013 two things happened: Android 4.4 introduced a print framework, in which a print manager hands each job to an installed print service, so that manufacturers could plug in their own; and Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox launched the Mopria Alliance to promote simple mobile printing across brands. Mopria's technology later became the basis of the default print service built into Android.

The archive's guide to driverless printing lays out the full stack. Its consequence for the story is simple: the burden moved. Translating for a particular model stopped being the job of every computer and became the job of the printer, which now had to implement the standards and describe itself correctly.

The phone became part of the document workflow

Before that inversion, phones printed badly or not at all. The archive's history of mobile printing before AirPrint records five separate workarounds for portable devices between 1998 and 2010, from cameras and PDAs to feature phones, each with its own failure. In 2013 the Printer Working Group named two obstacles: mobile devices roam from network to network constantly, and their small, lower-cost form factor, including memory size, does not allow for device-specific drivers.

The archive draws a sharp conclusion from that record: the phones of 2010 were not dramatically better at printing than the phones of 2006; the printers were. Its history of wireless printing describes the same change from the printer's side. The printer stopped being a fixed endpoint that you walked to and became a discovered service that any device on the network could use briefly and forget.

Meanwhile the documents themselves moved. A page that needs printing now often reaches a person first on a phone: as an email attachment, a photo of a paper form, a file in cloud storage or a web page. Both platforms answer with a built-in path. The archive's workflows for printing from an iPhone and printing from an Android device describe it in a few steps, and when the printer supports the standards and shares the phone's network, nothing model-specific needs to be installed.

Why a printing app, when the phone can already print?

That is the fair question to put to Smart Printer, an app in the HELPERG ecosystem for iPhone and Android, and its App Store listing points to an answer, at least for iPhone. Smart Printer does not claim to replace the platform's printing there: the listing states that printing works through AirPrint, without installing additional drivers or software. On iPhone, then, it sits on top of the driverless layer this story has followed, not in place of it.

What it adds is the part of the job that moved to the phone. The listings describe printing photos, documents, emails and web pages, with files in PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, JPG, PNG and TXT formats and imports from Dropbox and iCloud Drive. The camera scans documents, IDs, passports, receipts, business cards and notes, and scans can be edited, filtered and saved in various formats. Before anything is printed, the app offers a PDF preview, and its listing describes settings for the number of copies, page orientation and paper size; its screenshots also show a set of ready-made printables, from gift cards to calendars and planners.

Read that way, the iPhone app is a small, current example of the whole transition. The driver no longer lives on the phone, because the printer and the operating system share the standards. What the phone holds instead is the document in all its forms, and a printing app's job is to gather that document, prepare it and hand it to a printer that already knows how to describe itself.

Smart Printer today

Smart Printer is listed under slightly different names in the two stores: as Smart Printer: Scan Master Pro on the App Store, with HRHELPERG LLC as its developer, and as Printer Smart: Scan, Print PDF on Google Play, published by hrhelperg s.r.o. The Google Play listing carries the same feature description as the App Store listing; this article makes no claim about how the Android version connects to printers.

The larger transition

Printing did not disappear. What changed is where the work around it happens. The printer went from a peripheral of one computer to a service on a network that announces what it can do. The driver went from per-model software on every machine to shared standards in the printer and the operating system. And the preparation of a page, finding the file, scanning the form, choosing the copies, moved to the device a person carries.

That is the kind of change PrinterArchive exists to record: not the disappearance of a technology, but the quiet relocation of its parts. Each step in this story kept the printed page and moved something else, first the cable, then the driver, then the desk itself. Fax made the same journey from a telephone-line machine to software, as the companion story on fax traces. Smart Printer is one of the places this last step has landed.