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One of the questions we are asked most often: how to scan to PDF with Android? It may seem like a trivial question, but it actually hides several pitfalls. In fact, as you can imagine if you have been following us for a long time, the most downloaded products on the Play Store are also the ones with the most tracers and with more advertising.
However, this does not mean that to scan documents with Android you necessarily have to give up your privacy and freedom. For example, we often scan important and very personal documents such as driving licenses, passports or even hospital reports.
One of the things to avoid is therefore that the application we are going to use does not have access to the internet, especially if we are talking about a closed software application. Alternatively we may want to block their access to the network thanks to NetGuard.
How to scan to PDF on Android without tracers nor advertising
Furthermore we would also like our application not to be full of banners and tracers. This is obviously a utopia, in fact if we go and see what Adobe Scan, one of the most used, contains, we'll be amazed. In fact, there are tracers of Facebook, Google, Demdex (Adobe advertising) and others 1. Furthermore, many, perhaps too many, permits are often required. On the Exodus website you can independently check how many tracers and how many permissions your favorite application requires: reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/it/.
Our choices
It is for this reason that we offer you two alternatives.
Open Note Scanner
Open source
It is an excellent document scanner, it works very well and its use is rather simple and immediate. It's a project Open source 2 and if possible download the su version F-Droid as the one on Play Store contains tracers and advertising 3.
• • •Clean Scan
Open source
Other application Open source 4 very interesting with which you can scan easily PDF documents and also do OCR. It is not available on F-Droid and you can only find it on Google Play. However, being Open source, you can download the APK directly on GitHub.
• •OSS Document Scanner
Open source
Another application Open source 5 simple and light. It requires internet connection because it allows you to synchronize your documents using WebDAV, therefore very convenient for backups and for automatically uploading files to your server or a cloud using WebDAV. Once you have taken the photo you can share it on any application. There is also an OCR for the English language which however we have not tried.
• • •Docus
Open source
An application Open source 6 very simple for create PDF documents thanks to your camera. Available on F-Droid through IzzyOnDroid and you can also find it on Google Play. However, being Open source, you can download directly the APK on GitHub.
• • •Genius Scan
If instead we are looking for one that is not necessarily Open source we can try the application Genius Scan. Perhaps one of the best on the market with many free and paid options. There their privacy policy it's good, nothing is sent around ei tracers present inside are only for statistics and bug fixes 7.
•kDrive
Open source
also available for iOS
The official application of kDrive, from the Infomaniak company and which we have often talked about, allows you to easily scan documents and automatically insert them into your drive. So if you already have kDrive or if you plan to do so, this application can be a great alternative. Be careful because in the above version F-Droid currently it is not possible to use this function.
• • • •OpenScan
Open source
Attention: OpenScan it is currently not maintained and its latest release dates back to 2021. It does not require internet connection and should not be a problem but take into account and perhaps prefer other alternatives first.
It is a great document scanner with tons of features. It's a project Open source 8 free and can only be downloaded on F-Droid through Repositories Of IzzyOnDroid. However, it requires very few permissions and does not contain any tracer 9.
• •- https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/it/reports/com.adobe.scan.android/latest/[↩]
- OpenNoteScanner on GitHub[↩]
- Exodus OpenNoteScanner reports[↩]
- source code of Clean Scan on GitHub[↩]
- source code OSS Document Scanner[↩]
- source code of Docus on GitHub[↩]
- Genius Scan on Exodus[↩]
- OpenScan on GitHub[↩]
- OpenScan Exodus Report[↩]
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