Brother iPrint&Scan

This app essentially useless and totally outdated — it doesn’t seem to do much of anything itself. Instead, after linking my printer to it, whenever I tried requesting a feature (e.g., checking the printer status, print history, toner remaining, etc.) the app doesn’t do anything itself….it just opens a browser window within the app and tries to do what I asked the app to do via the browser window (but 99 times out of 100, the browser window won’t actually connect to my printer!). If I wanted to check my printer via a series of browsers windows, I wouldn’t need a dedicated printer app from the manufacturer. Come on Brother - it’s 2026, yet this app seems like it’s 15-20 years old in terms of its design and functionality. It should be scrapped completely and replaced with a modern version (BTW, yes, Brother does have modern apps that work fine with SOME printers, but not all of them…. when I used one of the other modern apps with my 2 printers, only one of my printers (the B&W model) was compatible with the other app (even though that printer is many years older than my color printer). My color printer would not work with the modern app, and that other app told me that I needed to download and use this horrible app instead. How dumb.

I purchased my brother printer model: MFC-J480DW approximately 3-4 years ago. I wanted a printer that I could wirelessly print from my iPhone. I use the iPrint&Scan app. Up until 5-6 months ago everything worked great. The only time I had to reconnect/re-link my cell phone to my printer was after a power or internet outage. But not anymore! Every time I want to print something I have to set-up a new connection, like it’s the very first time I’m using it. So now I’m having to purchase a new printer that I can depend on & depend on it’s connection. I purchased my Brother printer because I was assured that it was easy to set-up wirelessly & would keep the connection. Which ever since 5-6 months ago, it won’t. I can’t walk 10 feet away from my printer without it loosing its wireless connection to my iPhone. I have spoken to brother support and apple support regarding this. Just to make sure I was linking them correctly. Which I knew I was, since it worked fine for years. But now I absolutely hate everything about Brother. All I can think is that an update did something to the brother iPrint&Scan app. I can’t believe that a huge corporation would allow something like this (app update) to loose thousands of customers for them. I didn’t read one good review. Which tells me Brother doesn’t care about there customers or keeping them!

I would rate the user interface as “fine” by 2009 standards, and just not up to date compared to today, but this app works shockingly well for faxing out, scanning to Files app (big one for me), printing (though I usually just use AirPrint natively in files), and machine/ink status for my 7 year old Brother MFC J480DW on my iPad Pro 3 11” running 15.4.1. The fact that I can do this stuff relatively smoothly from my iPad to my ancient printer on a different VLAN’d subnet is insanely cool*. Four stars for doing the job reliably and in some cases above expectations (for the most part), but not five because boy it hurts to look at. *Since mDNS and therefor Bonjour is a multicast service, the printer is only “visible” to things on its own subnet; you need to get Avahi Reflector running somewhere on your network to cheat and bounce the mDNS Bonjour packets between the subnets for interVLAN routing, EVEN if your interVLAN firewall is set up correctly, or the app won’t see the printer advertising and therefor won’t know where to find it; same with Airplay and AirPrint and Roku across subnets. Once Avahi is reflecting packets between the subnets, you’re home free. Make sure to set Avahi’s cache size to 0 or the printer and device names start to get real funky after a few weeks.