There is a mothership -- it is just built into an Apple device, and Apple spent a lot of effort getting this all to work, and they can only get it to work becau

There is a mothership -- it is just built into an Apple device, and Apple spent a lot of effort getting this all to work, and they can only get it to work because they control all sides. Try setting up a generic wlan-compatible printer and a macOS laptop on a local network. I have such setup, and it is just fails every once in a while for no reason. I would not recommend this to anyone over well-run centralized server.