HP Disables Printer Functionality Until You Install the HP Smart App | Hacker News Reader

HP Disables Printer Functionality Until You Install the HP Smart App

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143 pointsschappim61 comments

A member of our warehouse team contacted me.

Here's how the conversation unfolded at work:

Warehouse Team Member: "Could you log into the App Store and download an app for the printer to work?"

Me: "That doesn't sound right." I remotely accessed the warehouse computer, opened a random PDF document, and hit 'Print'. The printer queue looked normal to me.

Me: "It seems to be printing just fine."

Warehouse Team Member: "No, it actually prints a message that says you need to install the app."

Me: "What really? Can you send me a photo of it?"

Warehouse Team Member: Sends the photo in Slack.

Me: "This is something I have to Tweet..."

---

Edit: Imagine being the product manager who made this decision...

I would use a baseball bat to fix it, that's so evil.

On the printer or product manager?

Yes.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8

A while back I was in a partner channel meeting for hp and it was all enthusiastic cheers for this specific decision.

Metrics will go up, hooray!

What's even the benefit for HP? What do they gain by people installing this app?

My guess is that once the app is installed it's easier to convince the user to sign up for an ink subscription. And then once that's done it's easy for the user to forget they've done that. They won't even see the charge, it'll just be lost among the tons of other "Apple.com" charges that come across each month.

Selling usage data ?

And yet people keep buying hp printers

I wouldn't call that type of managers "people". They're monsters.

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's my experience on macOS)

The Canon professional line is one of those too.

Agreed, my HL-110 has worked like a charm since I bought it a few years back. No messing around, dark patterns or apps... it just works.

from osmosifying printer recommendations on HN the last few years, aren't brother printers becoming enshittened too? Nowadays they might try to lock out third party ink and toner cartridges, for example? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

All printers are inherently shit, some are simply manufactured more evil than others.

I was astounded at how well the brother printer I got worked. As soon as I connected it to wifi, it just popped up on my macbook and worked perfectly.

My hp printer works all right just by starting cups service. I must be really lucky.

I got an HP laser a couple years ago that has behaved properly, but at this point I would think twice and thrice before even getting one of those.

They bought Samsung's printer business and Samsung made wonderful laser printers that worked flawlessly, without any printer industry shenanigans. Maybe you bought one of their printers right after the acquisition, when HP had only enough time to change the branding.

I haven't confirmed myself, but apparently there are costco specific models of these kinds of printers which don't demand apps, internet connections, or a linked credit card. Presumedly demanded by costco to reduce the returns that would result.

I have a Brother laser printer that is now almost 20 years old. I had to buy a dozen toners and the only fault was due to the rubber pads deteriorating (20y near a window in an office). Even now, I connect it to the wired network and it's automatically recognised by all the devices without any configuration.

Oki is like that too. So not all is lost.

Unfortunately they do not market to the US anymore.

"OKI Data Americas has discontinued the sales of all OKI-branded printer hardware in the United States, Canada, and Latin America." (https://www.oki.com/us/printing/index.html)

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's so fucking depressing to read it in comparison to anything modern. It'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's like a warm fucking hug.

I'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.

>the manual for it has fucking control flowcharts and timing diagrams for the signalling. It's so fucking depressing to read it in comparison to anything modern. It'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.

I don't know about you but the typical user just wants their printer to work, not spend hours figuring out "control flowcharts and timing diagrams". Even for a technical users I doubt you'll find many that want to geek out on how their printers and writing their own drivers. Also, despite how shitty it is to have to install an app and connect to the internet for a printer to work, if I have a report due tomorrow or a government form that needs to be filled in ASAP, I'd rather contend with the app than "control flowcharts and timing diagrams".

Sure I get that, but like, I didn't need to write a driver for it to print text, that worked out of the box on windows, and this printer is 30 years old. Having the one thing doesn't preclude the other. There's a zero percent chance that modern printers aren't going to be e-waste in a couple years. That's the problem, we could make good printers that can render postscript in 2024 and 2054 too, but greed prevents that.

Except in reality the alternative to the app isn't timing diagrams, but a printer working as is without any apps

The fact that you ignored - having such info means it's more likely you'll be able to get help cheaper and faster (helpful in ASAP situations) - doesn't even need to be considered for the first point to work

I have an MPS-801 dot matrix printer for my Commodore 64. The biggest challenge is buying listing paper at a sensible price.

/Also have a Panasonic KX-P1124, but it weighs a ton and I've no room to keep it out so it lives in a cupboard for now.

There are good products and bad products in every era. Sure, there are trends as well, which change over the years, but the matrix printer times also had a lot of shitty matrix printers, as well as other products that had things we have outright banned since then.

Is this not literally a federal crime? It sounds like HP installed a backdoor on its printers to download malware that disables the printer.

If it's not a crime, I think it should become one, and I don't think a terms & conditions document should be able to protect against it (in the same way you can't, e.g., enforce a contract with illegal clauses).

They already f*cked this up big time: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/hp-rushes-t...

I've still got an old HP and disabling the internet connection on my router was the first thing I did when it worked.

>visit hp.com/plus-support for additional setup help

My guess is that the person in question bought a model/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't see the issue with this as long as this was clearly disclosed on the box when the printer was purchased.

[1] https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/hp-plus.html

I looked up the model M110w and found:

> This printer is intended to work only with cartridges that have a new or reused HP chip, and it uses dynamic security measures to block cartridges using a non-HP chip. Periodic firmware updates will maintain the effectiveness of these measures and block cartridges that previously worked. A reused HP chip enables the use of reused, remanufactured, and refilled cartridges.

This is the future of printers...

> This is the future of printers...

Not if people refuse to buy from companies that do this

I've recently successfully talked someone out of buying a HP printer precisely because of shady practices like this. I believe more people should do the same

Epson: open the lid, pour ink in reservoirs, put the lid back on, print.

epson.com > products > printers > inkjet printers > check "ink tank system" => 134 models to choose

The picture shows model number M110w, which has an optional "instant ink" (toner) add-on service. According to HP, only model numbers ending in "e" are Printing As A Service and have ink/toner subscriptions required.

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?

Apple got away with it because they started from that position creating a niche for themselves and a "reality distortion field' that sets their products apart (for some people) based on perceived quality.

HP has no such brand recognition, if anything it's products' quality is worse than its competitors' products.

I suspect it's trying to do a Samsung who did the same, but without any advertising or headlining products (which started with Samsung's S3/S4 phones years ago), so their marketing is completely balls-ing up the company's position.

More to the point, why isn’t there an open source printer operating system that fucks off all this malware?

I’ve long wondered if printers ship ‘samples’ of printed documents back to the vendors to ‘allow for an improved customer experience’.

"HP TouchPoint Assistant" and the printer-stories around is totally enough for me to never ever buy any 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't let it download, though. It would probably make the device worse.

Like the ET-3750 from costco? In my experience the updates work fine.

I never had a problem with updates on my Epson, but having bad experinces with other products, I can understand your concern. I don't remember now if there was an option to disable updates or not, but when I last reorganized my home network, I put all untrusted devices including this printer in a no-gateway subnet. It can't call home, check or download anything. The only problem is that scanning to computer from the printer panel is based on multicast, and I couldn't figure out how to route that yet.

HP has such a bad reputation in this area [1] that it's rubbing off on other printer makers.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/hp-breaks-its-own-pr...

This is why I buy old enterprise 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.

LJ4 (the plain base model) (2005-2012) -> 4000 (2012-2020) -> M402dw (2020-present).

* Modern HP LJ printer cartridges include goddamn DRM hostile to repeated refilling, but thankfully it's not a show-stopper as overseas hackers found low-cost workarounds with (fake?) chips. Fuck the DMCA and goddamn corporate lobbyists.

I worked with an old LJ 5siMX. It was a pain to set the static IP configuration but other than that, amazing. Printed a buttload of insurance policies for years, plus simple text reports improved with a few PCL commands. And a proper PS renderer, not a Win driver in sight. Bliss.

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 & medical docs? Kinkos & the library don’t feel like good alternatives … Is there some place that is good / safe to do this??

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.

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.

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.

> There is no reason a printer needs an app like that

Stealing your data and other nefarious business practices.

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't seem to?

I just avoid anything made by HP, everything from their laptops to printers to servers seem to suck nowadays.

"There's an app for that!" has become "there's an app for that??"

It'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 'smart' devices, as is the case with Philips Hue bulbs. Wish the EU would focus their efforts on this kind of nonsense.

toothbrush, dishwasher

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

What's a "Printer Claim Code"?

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's Windows PC, my wife's iPad, my work MacBook and my Linux laptop. The Samsung printer itself is a dumb ML-2160 series that doesn't support AirPrint.

No need for these idiotic printers.

I think it was as simple as installing CUPS, going to http://localhost:631/admin and enabling "Share printers connected to this system".

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.

Does HP do anything that could be considered quality? I'd be ashamed to work for them.

Ok ... just let's boycott HP Pr0n!

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