Printer App: frequently asked questions

Yes — Printer App hands every normal job straight to your iPhone's AirPrint, so the printer has to support AirPrint, be switched on and share the same Wi-Fi. The Advanced tab can discover and save some printers that lack AirPrint, but it still can't print to anything that only speaks Raw (port 9100) or LPD.

Any AirPrint model from those brands works, since the app rides on the same print system as the rest of iOS. Older models without AirPrint are out of reach. One disclosure: Printer App is independent, not affiliated with or sponsored by any printer maker.

No login, no sign-up. Buy Pro and the purchase runs through your Apple ID in the App Store, same as any app.

Not for the basics — iOS already prints from Files, Photos and Safari on its own. What Printer App adds is the stuff iOS doesn't do: passport photo sheets, multi-page posters, collages, OCR, Office-to-PDF, merging and compressing PDFs, batch printing and a reprint history.

Nine times out of ten it's the printer asleep, on a different Wi-Fi network (a guest network, or separate 2.4/5 GHz names), or simply too old for AirPrint. The in-app Troubleshooting guide walks through Try AirPrint First, Check WiFi Connection and Check Printer Power. If the iOS print sheet shows no printer, this app can't reach it either — that part isn't up to the app.

You need a local network between phone and printer, not internet access — your home Wi-Fi works, or a printer's own Wi-Fi Direct network. Internet only gets used by Print Web Page, the ads, and purchases.

PDF, RTF and plain text, one file at a time. Word, Excel and PowerPoint have to go through Office to PDF (Pro) first, and pictures go through Print Photo or Photos to PDF instead.

Print Photo only takes one. For more than one, use Photos to PDF (free, one photo per page), Photo Collage (several on one page) or Batch Print (Pro).

Neither this app nor anyone else can promise that. It sizes your photo to the chosen format, centre-crops it and tiles copies on the sheet — it doesn't detect faces, check head size or whiten a background. Check your country's actual photo rules, print at true size, and measure one copy with a ruler before you cut anything.

Only for the Advanced tab, which scans your Wi-Fi for printers and tests connections. Ordinary AirPrint printing is run by iOS and works fine even if you decline.

The free version runs ads, and tracking just lets those ads be personalized — refuse it and printing behaves exactly the same, with generic ads instead. Pro drops ads entirely, so that question goes away too.

On the device, nowhere else. Settings, saved printers and history live in the app, and a copy of each printed or scanned file sticks around for reprinting. Clear History in Settings wipes the entries and those copies. Nothing touches iCloud.

Open History from the Home tab, or View History in Settings, find the entry and tap its printer icon. Documents, photos and scans keep a stored copy; web page prints show up in the list but can't be reprinted from there — print again from the browser instead.

OCR reads text in photos you pick, using Apple's on-device recognition, and the result depends entirely on the photo. Handwriting isn't a stated feature — don't count on it. To OCR a PDF that's just scanned images, Batch Print has an OCR image-only PDFs option.

No, and this trips people up. Compress redraws every page as a JPEG, so text stops being selectable or searchable, and a file that's already small may not shrink at all. Keep the original around if you'll ever need the text.

No — Printing Defaults (color, duplex, page parity, watermark and so on) only apply inside Batch Print. For one-off prints, set those options in the iOS print dialog itself.

Only that the printer's network port answers back. It says nothing about whether the printer can actually print from your phone, and printers listed as Raw or LPD still can't take jobs from the app.

Tap Manage Subscription in Settings to land on Apple's own subscription page, where cancelling lives. On the upgrade screen, Restore brings back a purchase made with the same Apple ID on a new device.