HP Disables Printer Functionality Until You Install the HP Smart App

A member of our warehouse team contacted me.<p>Here&#x27;s how the conversation unfolded at work:<p>Warehouse Team Member: &quot;Could you log into the App Store and download an app for the printer to work?&quot;<p>Me: &quot;That doesn&#x27;t sound right.&quot; I remotely accessed the warehouse computer, opened a random PDF document, and hit &#x27;Print&#x27;. The printer queue looked normal to me.<p>Me: &quot;It seems to be printing just fine.&quot;<p>Warehouse Team Member: &quot;No, it actually prints a message that says you need to install the app.&quot;<p>Me: &quot;What really? Can you send me a photo of it?&quot;<p>Warehouse Team Member: Sends the photo in Slack.<p>Me: &quot;This is something I have to Tweet...&quot;<p>---<p>Edit: Imagine being the product manager who made this decision...

At this point Brother seems to be one of the few printer manufacturers who still produce printers that just work out of the box with a cable or WiFi connection using an OS-supplied driver (at least that&#x27;s my experience on macOS)

I recently picked up an old dot matrix printer for $1 at the Electronics Flea Market, and the manual for it has fucking control flowcharts and timing diagrams for the signalling. It&#x27;s so fucking depressing to read it in comparison to anything modern. It&#x27;s so nice and it feels like it was made for me by people who actually cared about me as a human experiencing their product. It&#x27;s like a warm fucking hug.<p>I&#x27;ve written a driver for it and have it hooked up to my router with a little web interface and my partner and I have been using it to print out todo lists and cute little notes. I even wrote some dithering tools to get it printing images, gameboy printer style.

Is this not literally a federal crime? It sounds like HP installed a backdoor on its printers to download malware that disables the printer.<p>If it&#x27;s not a crime, I think it should <i>become</i> one, and I don&#x27;t think a terms &amp; conditions document should be able to protect against it (in the same way you can&#x27;t, e.g., enforce a contract with illegal clauses).

&gt;visit hp.com&#x2F;plus-support for additional setup help<p>My guess is that the person in question bought a model&#x2F;sku that operates not as a typical printer (ie. you pay for the machine and its consumables), but as a printer as a service model[1] (ie. you pay per pages printed). In that case it does make sense that you need to install the app (presumably to connect the printer to the internet and to connect to your account) for the service model to work. I don&#x27;t see the issue with this as long as this was clearly disclosed on the box when the printer was purchased.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;printers&#x2F;hp-plus.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hp.com&#x2F;us-en&#x2F;printers&#x2F;hp-plus.html</a>

I particularly enjoyed the immediate attempt by HP customer services to take the discussion about their grubby practices into private messages.

How has this company managed to survived wall gardening their printers?<p>Apple got away with it because they started from that position creating a niche for themselves and a &quot;reality distortion field&#x27; that sets their products apart (for some people) based on perceived quality.<p>HP has no such brand recognition, if anything it&#x27;s products&#x27; quality is worse than its competitors&#x27; products.<p>I suspect it&#x27;s trying to do a Samsung who did the same, but without any advertising or headlining products (which started with Samsung&#x27;s S3&#x2F;S4 phones years ago), so their marketing is completely balls-ing up the company&#x27;s position.

&quot;HP TouchPoint Assistant&quot; and the printer-stories around is totally enough for me to never <i>ever</i> buy <i>any</i> HP product. At work, I accidentally got a laptop with bloat-ware, last time. Practices like these have eroded (default) trust I had in them.

I have an Epson ink tank printer which keeps telling me that new firmware is available. I won&#x27;t let it download, though. It would probably make the device worse.

This is why I buy <i>old enterprise</i> LaserJet printers. Also, the toner cartridges are more generous and recycled* ones are relatively cheap. I currently have 4 spares which is probably enough for its entire lifecycle of me printing a return to page to flEaBay or as required by some antique government bureaucratic bullshit that demands the killing of trees.<p>LJ4 (the plain base model) (2005-2012) -&gt; 4000 (2012-2020) -&gt; M402dw (2020-present).<p>* Modern HP LJ printer cartridges include goddamn DRM hostile to repeated refilling, but thankfully it&#x27;s not a show-stopper as overseas hackers found low-cost workarounds with (fake?) chips. Fuck the DMCA and goddamn corporate lobbyists.

A waste of a perfectly good PostScript rasterizer.

So I think a lot of people say that they’d rather print photos at a drugstore (or some other online service), which totally makes sense. But if you completely ditch printers at home, which kind of makes sense; where do you feel safe printing contracts &amp; medical docs? Kinkos &amp; the library don’t feel like good alternatives … Is there some place that is good &#x2F; safe to do this??<p>Also, what if HP is actually intentionally getting all of use to hate printing on paper altogether? Maybe this is the biggest corporate tree-hugger event in the history of mankind. Nah, no way … it’s definitely money grab.

I got an HP printer a few years ago. I tried setting it up using my laptop, even installing their app. I spent an hour or two and made 0 progress.<p>I was about ready to give up and return it when I begrudgingly installed their iOS app… the thing was setup in 2 minutes and once on the network my laptop could see and print to it.<p>This mobile-first nonsense has really gone too far. There is no reason a printer needs an app like that, and I have to believe a majority of printing is still done from desktops and laptops. Either way, a printer should not require a cell phone to set up.

Usually you can tell if an HP has this crap preloaded if it has an e on the end of the model number, however this one doesn&#x27;t seem to?<p>I just avoid anything made by HP, everything from their laptops to printers to servers seem to suck nowadays.

&quot;There&#x27;s an app for that!&quot; has become &quot;there&#x27;s an app for <i>that??</i>&quot;<p>It&#x27;s the same thing with things like thermometers, scales, and other bluetooth accessories that really absolutely deserve no app. Similarly, the requirement to sign into cloud services to use &#x27;smart&#x27; devices, as is the case with Philips Hue bulbs. Wish the EU would focus their efforts on this kind of nonsense.

And it is BW laser... A cheap one, but stil...

What&#x27;s a &quot;Printer Claim Code&quot;?

I run a Pi that runs CUPS under Raspbian and exposes the wireless Samsung printer on the same network as a network shared printer. This works from my Android phone, my wife&#x27;s Windows PC, my wife&#x27;s iPad, my work MacBook and my Linux laptop. The Samsung printer itself is a dumb ML-2160 series that doesn&#x27;t support AirPrint.<p>No need for these idiotic printers.<p>I think it was as simple as installing CUPS, going to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;localhost:631&#x2F;admin" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;localhost:631&#x2F;admin</a> and enabling &quot;Share printers connected to this system&quot;.

Why would anyone want to buy from such a disgusting business? I thought there antics were well known enough by now that their brand was completely tarnished.<p>Does HP do anything that could be considered quality? I&#x27;d be ashamed to work for them.

Ok ... just let&#x27;s boycott HP Pr0n!