Google Play / productivity / HP PRINT SERVICE PLUGIN
REVIEW
HP Print Service Plugin is the boring driver doing the work HP Smart gets the credit for.
The Android system print plugin most users install by accident, blame for problems caused by HP Smart, and then leave installed because it actually works.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
HP Print Service Plugin
HP INC.
OUR SCORE
7.0
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.1
PRICE
Free
HP Print Service Plugin is the Android app that nine out of ten users couldn’t tell you they have installed. It runs as a system print extension, surfacing HP printers inside the standard Android print dialog when you hit Print from Chrome or Gmail. There’s no icon to tap, no account to set up, no upsell screen. For a free utility from a Fortune 100 hardware vendor, the restraint is genuinely refreshing.
The 4.13-star rating reads worse than the app deserves, and the reason is unfortunate. A meaningful fraction of the one-star reviews are aimed at HP Smart — the separate consumer app that handles ink subscriptions, scanning, and HP+ enrolment — or at the cartridge-DRM controversies that flared up across HP’s printer line in 2022 and again in 2024. The plugin doesn’t manage cartridges. It doesn’t enforce subscriptions. It’s a driver. But Play Store reviews don’t distinguish, and HP has never written a first-run screen that explains the difference.
Set that confusion aside and the actual app is quietly competent. Network discovery works, print jobs land, duplex and colour options pass through to the printer. Print quality matches what the printer is capable of, because the plugin is rendering to the printer’s native page-description language rather than re-encoding through a generic raster path. For the boarding-pass-from-Gmail use case Android print should have been all along, this is it.
Most of the one-star reviews are aimed at a different app. The plugin itself is a print driver, and as print drivers go it's quietly competent.
FEATURES
HP Print Service Plugin is not a consumer app. It's a print service extension — the lower-level driver that Android's built-in print framework loads when you tap Print from Chrome, Gmail, Drive, or any other app's share sheet. Once installed, it advertises HP printers on the local network (and connected via USB / Wi-Fi Direct) to Android's print picker, then translates the document into whatever format the printer speaks.
Setup is meant to be invisible. The plugin auto-discovers HP printers over mDNS / Bonjour, exposes them by name, and hands the print job off to the system. No login, no account, no separate UI to launch from the home screen — the only time you "open" the plugin is to toggle it on under Settings → Connected devices → Connection preferences → Printing.
This is distinct from HP Smart, the much larger consumer app that handles scanning, ink subscriptions, photo printing, and HP+ account management. The plugin is a driver; HP Smart is a control center. Many users install both, blame the plugin for HP Smart's behaviour, and leave one-star reviews on the wrong app.
Free. No ads, no in-app purchases. Updated regularly — last shipped April 2026, original release May 2013.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Discovery is the genuine win. Drop an HP printer on the same Wi-Fi network and the plugin finds it within a few seconds, named correctly, ready to print. No pairing, no driver download, no manufacturer setup wizard. For users who just want to print a boarding pass from Gmail, this is the path of least resistance Android has.
Print quality is what the printer is capable of — the plugin is rendering to the printer's native page-description language (PCL or PWG-Raster depending on model), so a LaserJet's text comes out as crisp as it does from a Windows machine. Duplex, paper size, colour, and quality options all surface in the system print dialog without a separate driver UI.
The plugin stays out of the way. It has no home-screen icon by default, no notifications, no upsells, no telemetry-permission prompts at first use. For a free utility from a major hardware vendor in 2026, the restraint is unusual.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The 4.13 rating is doing a lot of work to mask two real problems. The first is identity confusion: a meaningful slice of the one-star reviews are about HP Smart's ink-cartridge restrictions, the HP+ subscription model, or firmware updates that disabled third-party cartridges — none of which the plugin controls. Google's Play Store offers no mechanism to redirect that complaint elsewhere, so it lands here. HP could fix this with a clearer first-run explainer; it hasn't.
The second is the real one: when a printer firmware update changes the model's print stack, the plugin sometimes loses the device until you reboot the phone, reboot the printer, or clear the plugin's storage. It's rare but it happens, and the only diagnostic Android gives the user is "printer offline". Older printers (pre-2018 OfficeJets and DeskJets especially) hit this more often than newer ones.
USB printing through an OTG cable works but is finicky on Android 14+ — newer Android USB permission prompts have made this less reliable than it was on Android 11.
CONCLUSION
If you have an HP printer and an Android phone, install the plugin and leave it alone. Don't confuse it with HP Smart, don't blame it for cartridge politics it has no part in, and don't go looking for a UI it doesn't have. As background utilities go, this is one of the better ones — free, focused, and competent at the one job it claims. Watch for whether Google's Android print framework gets meaningfully overhauled; if it does, plugins like this either get easier or get redundant.