Missing: Chrome OS camera scan tool unavailable for many

Two weeks ago, Google rolled out Chrome OS’s final update for 2022. Chrome OS 96 comes as the last update before the shift to the shorter, 4-week update cycle for Chrome OS. Shortly after the update, amid reports of Android App issues, the update was temporarily paused while a fix was concocted. Unfortunately, with the Play Store bug squashed, another problem has appeared with one of Chrome OS’s latest features and it seems to be affecting a wide range of users.

While many may have overlooked this new feature of Chrome OS 96, the addition of the camera app’s ability to scan documents appears to be a very popular new tool. The popularity of the new scan tool is reflected in the numerous Chromebook forum posts by users who are aggravated that certain devices seem to be missing the scan feature. Here is one such post.

I did a demonstration on the new camera scan feature on chromebook to students in our school in an effort to get them to submit legible online work. Over the next few days, I had a number of students say they didn’t have that feature as an option in their camera. We’ve tried updating their chromebook, but that did not solve the issue. 
Has anyone else run into this issue? Is the scan feature only on specific chromebooks, not universal?

Chromebook support forum

To clarify, this is not the Scan App that rolled out with Chrome OS 90. That tool gives users the ability to scan from capable wireless printers. This scan tool is actually integrated into the Chrome OS camera app and allows you to scan documents in a similar manner to how you can scan documents into Google Drive on your phone. (That’s a thing, by the way. If you don’t use it, you should. We use it for all of our receipts and it makes tracking purchases and spending a breeze.) Multiple Chromebook users – managed and personal devices – are stating that the scan feature is simply not there in the camera application.

One Google Product Expert has noted that their devices are experiencing the same issues with two newer Chromebooks having the scan tool while two older devices missing the feature. It is unclear, at this point, what the common denominator is here or how widely spread the bug might be. At the end of the day, it may boil down to something as simple as some devices just don’t have support for the feature at this time. Either way, the use cases for the scan tool appear to be greater than I would have imagined and users are eagerly awaiting a response and fix from Google. Hopefully, an incremental update will soon arrive to alleviate this hiccup. You can follow along with the support thread here.