HP Smart for Desktop 4+

HP has come along way with their products and the software that runs them. I've owned a HP Officejet Pro 8620 for about 2 years now. I used to cringe at installing or even updating HP drivers and software, but over the last 3-4 years installing, as well as updating their software has been truly seemless. Their quality has certainly improved vastly and continues too.
My wife works with individuals with special needs and she likes to print out worksheets to complete some of these individuals goals at the center that she is employed with. These worksheets strengthen hand eye coordination, basic math skills, money counting, and sentence structure. She prints a lot and she has never had any issues with either her phone or her laptop communicating with the printer....EVER. She is not the most tech savvy of individuals and so even she can use their products and integrate them into her daily life. I recommend their products, whole heartedly. As a Field Engineer at Intel Inc. I use their products at work and my home and I their software improves with each update. You can trust HP again.

I've been using this app since moving to Mac a year ago to use my generally reliable HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus. While some aspects were clunky (especially where login was required - and which shouldn't be required), the app generally performed its functions reasonably well. I mostly used it for scanning items to PDF and JPEG on my laptop, such as forms or doctor reports.

Over time, some improvements have been made, including native Apple Silicon support. I appeciate active development while supporting older devices. However, a recent update (version 15 perhaps, about 2 months ago?) made significant changes to the user interface, particularly in the scanning functions. There were a number of major interface regressions and lost capabilities and options; while some of these have been restored or improved (such as finer controls over where to save files), there remain major missing features or options. Most notably, I am unable to use the automated document feeder (ADF) on my scanner to scan more than one page or to scan a double-sided page, and there is no setting to use this in the software. As best as I can tell, each page has to be scanned manually. This feature worked fine for almost a year on Mac using this application, and as far as I can tell continues to work on my Windows machines using the helper application the same way this has always worked for 10 years.

When it worked, it was great. After the most recent update (I assume), the app would immediately crash when I tried to open it. Re-started everything, re-installed the app, still no luck. I had to use the virtual assistant and ask just the right questions in order to access a live chat, since the virtual chat couldn't solve my problem. To do a live chat, I had to still have my printer under warrantly (lucky me, it still was), even though it was an app issue, and I don't think it should have applied. The live chat person directed me to another service. Note--the chat service was not open on the weekend, but the phone number was. I trouble-shooted with the person on the phone. She told me I had to directly contact Apple about a compatability error (I don't think that is something that would work), or I could talk to another group to help. I explained this to the next person, who told me that in order to fix the problem I would have to order a new service (I think it was something like My HP Friends) which would cost starting close to $50 a month. I told him no thank you. Not counting the virtual assistant and live chats, I spent an hour 40 minutes on the phone. Although I learned some work-arounds while we were trouble-shooting to see where the actual problem was, I'm still in the same place with the app not working.