How to Fix Your HP Printer Drivers on macOS Catalina

Friday, November 13 2020

If you have an HP printer in your home or business, chances are that you have encountered this dreaded error dialog disrupting you whenever you are restarting your Mac or doing anything even vaguely connected to printing:

HPDM.framework will damage your computer.

Apart from being highly annoying, it causes your HP printer to stop working immediately. This was caused by HP asking Apple to revoke their signing certificates for unknown reasons, without having driver with an updated certificate in place — a massive slip-up for which, to my knowledge, HP has not appropriately apologized to this day. There’s also a lot of misleading information floating around, so here’s the short version that works.

Open System Preferences > Printers & Scanners and remove all installed HP printers. You will likely have to fight the disrupting error dialog multiple times.
Download the official uninstaller from this HP link. Close all applications and run it. It removes all traces of HP software, including drivers, from your system.
Restart.
Open System Preferences > Printers & Scanners and re-add your printer. macOS will automatically attempt to download and install the proper drivers.
Restart. Done.

After the Inkjet firmware debacle, I guarantee you my next printer will be anything but an HP machine. It’s simply shameful how far especially the printer division has deviated from the vision the company founders Hewlett and Packard initially established.