Why no printer drivers for Android?

[TomWho]

Yea. I have one printer on the Network by itself and one shared from a computer. A few programs are available; both independent and from the printer manufacturers, although driver updates for newer printers lag a lot. No operating system support to put "Print" on the program menues though as far as I can tell.

 

[mikedt]

Yea. I have one printer on the Network by itself and one shared from a computer. A few programs are available; both independent and from the printer manufacturers, although driver updates for newer printers lag a lot. No operating system support to put "Print" on the program menues though as far as I can tell.

I wouldn't actually expect "Print" from within app menus, because there's basically no printing framework within the mobile OS, unlike a heavyweight desktop OS. OfficeSuite pro from Mobile Systems does have print from within the app, but only has Google Cloud Print, because that's what they've chosen to support themselves.

The printing apps and solutions that are available do support just about everything you're likely to want printed anyway, namely documents and images.

Thing is printer manufacturers themselves usually supply whatever drivers are required for their latest printers. Often it's just Windows and Mac, and that's it. Linux drivers probably come from within the FOSS dev community.

 

[snapicus]

I tried out PrinterShare for awhile, but didn't like it due to the limited support for printers. The way I understand it is the print job gets shipped to a server farm for rendering and then gets sent back to the printer via the phone. So, you're at the mercy of whatever drivers they have available on their server farms unless you use the PrinterShare Windows app.

Let's Print Droid supports IPP, so I ended up using it with a CUPS server and it works like a charm so far. It's got a WIFI scan feature, but I haven't tried it yet.