Bluetooth and WIFI Printing for Android

Question

We would need a portable printer (handheld, it is important) that can connect to android phone via bluetooth or wifi.

What I know currently:

• No standard printing SDK available for Android this time
• There is a non official SDK called iPrint SDK. Have any of you tried it through wifi or bluetooth? Does it work?
• Printershare also claims to be programmaticly available. It would be ok for me to pay the one time fee $5 for it per phone. It has a lot of supported formats. Have you tried it with any handheld device? I asked them about the list of supported bluetooth printers (since it has a menu item "search for BT printer"), but they did not answered.

What I need to know above the already asked:

• How do you print from your android app?
• What kind of printer do you use?
• Is it planned in the standard android SDK to include printing? What is the roadmap? Is it available now as Beta or something?
• If we somehow (i dont think so) build own solution for printing via bluetooth, can you recommend standards and protocols to check and learn?

Answer 1

Starting with Android 4.4 you can print documents from a device to a hardware printer via wifi.

Android apps can now print any type of content over Wi-Fi or cloud-hosted services such as Google Cloud Print. In print-enabled apps, users can discover available printers, change paper sizes, choose specific pages to print, and print almost any kind of document, image, or file.

A brief example of how to start the printing process:

private void doPrint() {     PrintManager printManager = (PrintManager) getActivity().getSystemService(Context.PRINT_SERVICE);     printManager.print("My document", new CustomPrintDocumentAdapter(getActivity()), null); } 

where CustomPrintDocumentAdapter extends PrintDocumentAdapter.

More information is available on Android Developers.

Answer 2

Printing via Bluetooth on Android is not possible as of now (as per my knowledge), as Android does not support Bluetooth 'Profiles', such as BPP (Basic Printing Profile), HCRP (Hardcopy Replacement Profile), BIP (Basic Imaging Profile) etc. which are the common profiles used with Bluetooth Printing. Ref. this to know about Printing BT profiles.

Currently, Android supports OPP (Object Push Profile) which is used to send files over Bluetooth.

To have printing bluetooth profiles implemented within the Bluetooth Stack for Android, you can refer Sybase-iAnywhere-Blue-SDK-for-Android, which provides an SDK to add this functionality to the existing BT stack implementation on Android.

For Wifi printing, there are many apps on the market that allows you to print various documents and images from your Android phone. See PrinterShare for one such app. For Wifi printing, you can use any printer that you can connect over ethernet (LAN).

Also check out printers that are 'Google Cloud Print' enabled, which uses the cloud to print to a printer connected anywhere in the world, that supports this protocol. This is quite new in the market, but something that will definitely gain traction over the coming years. Check out Cloud print app here. and faq here.

Hope this helps take out a few questions off your list.