We may live in an increasingly digital world, but sometimes — love it or hate it — good old-fashioned pulp-based paper is still a necessity.

No matter what type of work you do, you’re bound to encounter the occasional page that needs to be printed or document that needs to be scanned. With your Android phone in hand, though, such scenarios don’t have to be a hassle. In fact, printing and scanning from Android is surprisingly simple these days — if you know where to look.

Follow this guide, and you’ll never be caught off guard again.

Printing from Android: The basic method

‘Twas a time when transforming a document from pixels on your smartphone’s screen into actual ink and paper required a cumbersome third-party plugin — or, worse yet, the daunting and unreliable (and mercifully no longer with us) Google Cloud Print service (gasp!).

Well, take a deep breath and smooth down those metaphorical hackles: Such horrific complications are no longer needed. At this point, provided you have a reasonably up-to-date Android device, the ability to print from your phone or tablet is built right into Android itself and as easy as can be.

Ever since 2017’s Android 8 release, Google’s been partnering with the Mopria Alliance — a nonprofit mobile printing standards organization — to bring a native and no-thought-requiring printing function to all Android devices. There’s really nothing to it: So long as you’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network as a Mopria-certified printer (and odds are, any printer in your office or home has that designation), all you have to do is find the print command in any app that offers it and then tap away with that pretty little finger of yours.

In Gmail or Outlook, for instance, you’d tap the three-dot menu icon directly above any email you’re viewing and then look for the “Print” command in the list of options that appears. The same is true with Microsoft Word, while in Google Docs, you’d open that same menu but first tap “Share & export” and then select “Print.”

JR Raphael / Foundry

Regardless of where you find it, once you start the printing process, your phone will automatically detect any printer’s presence on your network and list it as an option — and you can then print away to your heart’s content (or discontent, whichever the case may be).

JR Raphael / Foundry

Printing from Android: The advanced path

The built-in system we just walked through works fine for most basic printing needs — but if you require more intricate forms of mobile printing authentication (and if you’re working in an enterprise environment, there’s a decent chance you do) or if your printing demands other advanced work-oriented features (such as folding, stapling, or accounting-related input), you’ll need something a bit more robust.

The easiest answer comes from the same aforementioned Mopria Alliance, which has a free Mopria Print Service app that enables those sorts of next-level options. Once you’ve installed the app, accepted its terms, and granted it the necessary permissions to operate, you’ll follow the same steps described above to print from any print-supporting program on your phone. The Mopria Print Service will automatically take over as your device’s default print service and provide you with any advanced possibilities available on the printer you’re using.

(You could also opt to install your printer manufacturer’s own print service plugin — like the one offered by HP, for instance — but the Mopria app has the advantage of working seamlessly with practically any printer and preventing you from having to change apps or install additional apps whenever a new printer makes its way into your life.)

The Mopria Print Service app is a viable option for any devices still stuck on now-ancient outdated software as well — since it’ll work with practically any phone and Android version — and it has the side perk of empowering you to print from anywhere on your device, regardless of whether a proper print command is present: Simply use the standard Android share command from any app or process and then select “Mopria Print” from the menu that appears. You could even use that capability to select a chunk of text from an email, a web page, or anywhere else imaginable and then send only that specific text to a printer.

Scanning with Android via a physical scanner

If you’re near a physical scanner or multifunction printer, capturing a document and saving it onto your phone is a cinch: Just grab the free Mopria Scan app, created and maintained by that very same organization we talked about in the last two sections (how ’bout that?!).

Open the app up, accept the necessary terms and permissions, and make sure you’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the scanner you want to use — then look for your scanner in the list the app spits out. If you don’t see the scanner you need, look for the button to manually add a scanner by entering its name (whatever you want to call it) and IP address (usually listed somewhere within a scanner’s front-screen menu).

Once your scanner shows up, just tap its name to initiate a scan.

Scanning with Android via your phone’s camera

Maybe you don’t have or want to fuss with a standalone scanner and would rather just capture something using the camera that’s already in your purse, pocket, or pantaloons anyway. Believe it or not, you can actually get reasonably high-quality scans that way nowadays, and most people won’t even know the difference.

The Google Play Store houses a variety of apps that are up to the task, but the most powerful and versatile option for documents and other text-centric scanning is the free Google Drive app that’s probably already on your phone. Just open it up and tap the camera icon in its lower-right corner — or, if you want to save yourself a step, press and hold the Drive icon on your home screen or in your app drawer and then tap (or even save!) the “Scan” shortcut that pops up in that area — and, if necessary, look for the prompt to try out the new and improved Drive scanner.

This recently released version of the Drive scanner will automatically identify any documents in your camera’s view and almost instantly find their edges and capture a clean, tidy scan of them for you. It’ll keep looking for more documents or pages without any extra actions, too, which makes it delightfully easy to handle a slew of scans without wanting to gouge your eyes out.

Once you’re finished, tap the arrow button at the bottom of the Drive scanner’s screen to see what you’ve captured and optionally make adjustments. There, too, Drive makes things as simple as can be: You can tap an “Enhance” option to let the app figure out what’d make your scan look best and apply any and all adjustments for you, or you can use its built-in manual tools for cropping and rotating, cleaning, and applying filters to finesse whatever it is you’ve captured.

JR Raphael / Foundry

All that’s left is to tap the “Next” command to wrap things up and save your final file directly into your Drive storage — as a PDF or optionally also as a JPG, if you’d rather.

Last but not least, take note: If you’d prefer to have this same capability without the cloud storage connection, the same exact scanner interface also exists in the Google Files app — only there, everything you do is saved to your device’s own internal storage by default instead of going to Drive to start.

With technology like this, the line between physical and digital has never been easier to straddle.

This article was originally published in August 2019 and most recently updated in January 2026.