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Print from a phone without installing anything: AirPrint and Mopria

If your printer was made in the last decade, there is a good chance the phone in your hand can print to it without a manufacturer app. Here is how it works and the three things that usually go wrong.

By The Cloud to Print editors · · 6 min read
A Sharp office multifunction printer
A Sharp office multifunction printerSharp MX-M465 multifunction · Solomon203 · CC BY-SA 4.0

There was a time when printing a boarding pass from a phone meant installing a 200 MB app from your printer's maker, signing in, accepting marketing emails and being asked to add a "smart" subscription with a credit card attached. You can usually skip all of that. Apple and the Mopria Alliance run two standards that let phones find printers and print to them with no extra software.

Neither standard requires the printer to be a new one. If the machine on your desk was made in the last decade it almost certainly supports at least one, and probably both. Thirty seconds of setup gives you phone printing for the life of the printer, and lets everyone else in the house print without them needing to install anything either.

The short version

If you have an iPhone, iPad or Mac, your printer needs to speak AirPrint. If you have an Android phone, Chromebook or a Windows PC, it needs to speak Mopria. Most mid-range printers sold since about 2015 support both. You can confirm your model on the Mopria certified product list or by looking for an "AirPrint" line in the box specifications.

Once your phone and your printer are on the same Wi-Fi network, printing is: open the thing, pick Print from the share menu, pick the printer, tap Print.

Setting it up on an iPhone or iPad

  1. Make sure the printer is turned on and connected to your home Wi-Fi. Not your 5 GHz guest network, your main network. Many printers only see 2.4 GHz; most phones default to 5 GHz.
  2. On your phone, make sure you are on the same Wi-Fi network.
  3. Open the document, photo or web page. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow).
  4. Scroll down the share sheet until you see Print.
  5. Tap Printer. The phone will scan the network and list anything that answers to AirPrint.
  6. Choose your printer, set the number of copies and tap Print.

There is no app to install. If the printer does not show up, it does not speak AirPrint, or it is not on the same network, or its Wi-Fi has silently dropped (this happens).

Setting it up on Android

Modern Android phones have a Mopria-compatible Default Print Service built in. On Samsung phones it is usually already enabled; on Pixel phones you may need to add it.

  1. Open Settings → Connected devices → Connection preferences → Printing.
  2. Make sure Default Print Service is switched on. If it is not there, download the free Mopria Print Service from Google Play.
  3. Open what you want to print and use the Share → Print path, same as iPhone.

The Default Print Service on recent Android versions is Mopria under a different name.

What usually goes wrong

From the questions we get most often:

  • Printer is not on the list. It is on a different Wi-Fi band, or a mesh network's "guest" node, or a different SSID altogether. The fix is to connect the printer to the same network, not to update your phone.
  • Phone says "No AirPrint printers found" even though it printed yesterday. The router has probably handed the printer a new IP after a reboot. Power-cycle the printer. If it keeps happening, assign the printer a reserved address in your router.
  • It prints, but very slowly, or with odd colours. You are probably printing a huge photo at the highest quality. Drop quality to Normal unless you really need Best, and if you are using anything other than ordinary paper, tell the driver.
  • It prints a blank page or a page of hieroglyphics. The driver is confused. Cancel the job in the phone, cancel it on the printer, and try again. If a laser keeps spitting junk, make sure the paper size the phone is sending matches what is in the tray.

Scanning back to the phone

AirPrint and Mopria also cover scanning, though support varies. If your multifunction is AirPrint-enabled, the Files app on iPhone and iPad has a "Scan Documents" option that will use it. On Android, the same Default Print Service exposes scan actions in Files or a scanner app.

If you want more control, our scanning guide covers resolution, PDF versus JPEG, and when to pull out a dedicated scanner app.

The case for not installing the manufacturer app

Printer makers' apps do things AirPrint and Mopria do not: ordering ink, configuring the printer the first time, running head cleans, updating firmware. Install the app when you set up the printer, use it for the configuration, and then, if you prefer, uninstall it and rely on standards for everyday printing. Nothing in your printer breaks. For the rest of the family, phone printing without a sign-in is one less thing to explain, and for guests it is the difference between a quick favour and an hour of fiddling.

A note on printing from a Chromebook or a PC

Mopria is not only a phone standard. The same discovery and job format is built into Chrome OS and recent versions of Windows, so a Chromebook can print to your home printer without a driver download, and Windows 10 and 11 will find most Mopria-certified printers through the "Add a printer" dialog. On a Mac, the same role is played by AirPrint, which is why you can plug a brand-new Mac into your home Wi-Fi and have your three-year-old inkjet already waiting in the Print dialog.

The common thread is a protocol called IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) that sits underneath both. You do not need to know anything about it to use it. You only notice it when something refuses to print, at which point knowing the word is useful when you are reading the printer's documentation.

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