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With Help from Mopria, Android 9 Default Print Service Now Includes Wi-Fi Direct Printing

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The Mopria Alliance, a global non-profit organization devoted to developing industry-wide standards and solutions for printing and scanning with mobile devices, announced on August 9th that Android 9 (Pie) users can enjoy Wi-Fi Direct printing to Mopria-certified printers as a built-in feature on their mobile devices, courtesy of the Android Default Print Service that features core printing technology from the Mopria Print Service.

The Default Print Service was first introduced in the launch of Android 8 last year, and was a result of an ongoing collaboration with the Google Android team via the Android Open Source Project and the Mopria Alliance. The Default Print Service is said to provide convenient and intuitive printing with automatic printer discovery, allowing easy printing to more than 3,000 models and 100 million deployed Mopria-certified printers from any Android 8 or 9 device.

Wi-Fi Direct allows users to wirelessly connect their mobile devices directly to a compatible printer without joining a Wi-Fi network. This is an alternative to the standard method connecting via a router to the same Wi-Fi network as the printer. Wi-Fi Direct printing uses an encrypted, point-to-point connection that streamlines printing because it doesn’t require pairing or passwords.

Brent Richtsmeier, vice chairperson of the Mopria Alliance Steering Committee, commented: “A key tenant of the Mopria Alliance strategy is to simplify print and scan while also focusing on improving the printing experience on Android. Through continuous contributions to the Android Open Source Project, we will continue to make printing on Android as streamlined, secure and intuitive as possible.”

The Mopria Alliance notes that, In the five years since the establishment of the Mopria Alliance by founders Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and Xerox, the nonprofit membership organization has 22 members representing the worldwide printer and scanner business. In addition to the founding companies, the Mopria Alliance today includes Adobe, Brother, Dell, Epson, Fuji Xerox, Huawei, Lexmark, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Microsoft, NEC, OKI Data, Pantum, Primax, Qualcomm, Toshiba, Ricoh, Sharp, and YSoft.

The Mopria Alliance is responsible for making printing and scanning solutions more accessible and intuitive for consumer and business users through the Mopria Print Service App and Library. To date, Mopria print technology has been installed on more than 850 million devices and has been used to print more than half a billion pages.

The organization also recently released the Mopria Scan beta app with mobile document-scanning capabilities. The final release will be rolled out later this year.

For the latest list of Mopria certified printers and print accessories, visit the Mopria Alliance here.

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