PDF Scan is out now on Google Play. It does one job: you point the phone at a piece of paper, and you get back a clean PDF you can send, search and keep. Receipts, invoices, contracts, forms, school notes, a whiteboard after a meeting, an ID card. It does that without an account and without a cloud. The scans stay on your phone until you choose to share them.
Why another scanner
Most scanning apps want you to sign in, and many of them upload every page to their own servers so they can run text recognition there. For a shopping receipt that hardly matters. For a lease, a payslip, a medical form or the front of your ID card, it is a strange default: the document you were careful with now has a copy on someone else's computer.
Phones no longer need that. Finding the edges of a page and reading the text on it are both things a recent phone can do on its own, in a second or two. PDF Scan is built around that. Nothing about scanning needs the internet, so the app does not use it.
Two ways to scan
Auto-detect opens the document scanner built into the system — Google ML Kit on Android, Apple VisionKit on iPhone. It finds the four edges of the sheet, crops to them and straightens the page. For most paper this is the quickest route, and you can capture several pages in a row.
Manual scan is for when you would rather take the picture yourself: a page in a thick binder, a whiteboard, a form with no clear border. After the shot you drag the four corners onto the page. They snap to the edges they can find, and the app corrects the perspective, so a page shot at an angle comes out as a rectangle.
ID card mode asks for the front, then the back, and puts both sides on one A4 page.
Cleaning up the page
| Filter | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Original | the photo as taken, cropped and straightened |
| Magic Color | brighter paper and stronger colour, for printed pages |
| Grayscale | no colour, all the shades kept |
| Black & White | high contrast, for plain text |
| Eco | a lighter grey version that uses less ink when printed |
| Flatten | evens out shadows and uneven light |
Intensity and sharpness can be adjusted, and pages can be rotated or cropped again before you save.
What Flatten does, and what it does not. A page that will not lie flat, or one photographed under a single lamp, ends up with a dark corner or a shadow along the curl, and that shadow is what swallows the text. Flatten works out how the light falls across the page and removes that difference, so the paper comes out evenly white. It does not bend curved lines of text back into straight ones. If a book page is badly curved, press it flat first.
Text you can search
After a scan, text recognition runs on the phone, and the text it finds is laid invisibly over each page of the PDF. The page still looks like the original, but any PDF reader can search it, and you can select a line and copy it into an email. The same text feeds the search box in the app's library, so typing a supplier name or an invoice number finds the scan it appears on, even if you never gave the document a useful name.
Documents with more than one page
Add as many pages as you need. Before saving you can reorder them, delete one, or go back and edit any page. Saved documents can be renamed, and you can add pages to a document later — useful when the second half of a contract turns up a day after the first. Share a document as a PDF or as JPEG images, or open the PDF in the phone's own viewer.
The details
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Account | none — there is no sign-in |
| Storage | scans, PDFs and recognised text stay in the app's folder on the phone |
| Edge detection | on the device (Google ML Kit on Android, Apple VisionKit on iPhone) |
| Text recognition | on the device; nothing is uploaded |
| Export | PDF or JPEG, through the usual share sheet |
| Languages | 47, following the phone's language |
| Platforms | Android; the iPhone version is in App Store review |
Because nothing is stored anywhere else, deleting the app deletes your scans with it. If a document matters, share a copy to wherever you keep important files.
PDF Scan is free and shows ads from Google AdMob: a banner under My Documents and, now and then, a full-screen ad after you save or share a PDF. Ads never appear on the camera or editing screens. You can watch one short video to go 24 hours without ads, or remove them for good with a one-time purchase. Your documents are never passed to the ad network; the privacy policy sets out what the app stores and what the ad SDK can see.
Get PDF Scan
Free on Google Play. No account, no cloud, and the interface follows your phone's language.
Google PlayFrequently asked questions
Does PDF Scan need an internet connection?
No. Scanning, filters, text recognition and PDF export all run on the phone. The only things that use the network are the ads in the free version and the store, if you buy the ad-free upgrade.
Can it scan both sides of an ID card onto one page?
Yes. ID card mode asks for the front, then the back, and puts both on a single A4 page, which is the format most offices and banks ask for.
Will the Flatten filter fix a curved book page?
It fixes the lighting, not the shape. Flatten evens out the shadows and dark corners that a curled page or a desk lamp leaves behind, which is usually what makes those pages hard to read. It does not straighten curved lines of text, so pressing the page flat before you scan still helps.