The simplest Android app to scan documents

If you are interested in go paperlessyou probably think you need a scanner. It’s true that hardware scanners make it very simple to turn multi-page documents into PDFs. But most of us don’t have easy access to a scanner.

What we do have is phonesand those phones have very good cameras. This is where scanning programs come in.

These apps allow you to take photos of each page of a paper document, crop the edges of the photo and straighten everything, and then combine those photos into a PDF file. A scanning app is handy, but there’s a catch: many of the apps out there are rubbish.

That’s what you do FairScan stand out It’s an app to scan documents with your Android phone that just… scans documents. This is it.

FairScan creator Pierre-Yves Nicolas wrote in a blog post last year that he had previously tried various Android applications for scanning documents. “All of them have shown behavior that I certainly don’t want,” he says. These behaviors included obvious things like ads, hidden privacy violations, and shady practices like storing your documents in the cloud — and then using them to train AI — with only a small text prompt notifying you that it’s happening.

FairScan, which is both free and open source, does none of that. It scans.

Courtesy of Justin Pot

To get started, simply install the app. And yes, it’s Android only for now, but you can download it from the Google Play Store as well as F-Droidthe repository for open source Android applications.

Get the document you want to scan ready, place it on a flat surface in a well-lit room. Then aim your camera at the first page. A green box will surround the page—adjust until it surrounds the portion of the document you want to scan. Take the picture when you are ready.

If you have more pages, you can click the plus button to add them; this allows you to repeat the process with the next page. You can do this as many times as you want, so you can scan a multi-page document.

When you’re ready, you can export the scanned pages to either a single PDF or multiple JPEG files.

There are a few things you should keep in mind while scanning. Firstly, lighting is going to matter a lot. You don’t want the shadow of your phone to be in the image, so make sure your phone isn’t placed between your light source and the document you’re scanning. I find the app works best in a room with diffused lighting, whether it’s multiple lights illuminating your work surface, or multiple windows letting in lots of natural sunlight. It is also worth trying to get the paper document as flat as possible, to avoid distortions.