CleanScan — Offline PDF Scanner

Coming soon — CleanScan is not yet released on the App Store or Google Play. This page will link to the live listing once it is available.

The problem: you need a clean PDF, nowhere near a scanner

Most people need a proper PDF at the worst possible moment — standing in a supplier's car park, waiting at a client's reception, or sitting on a train, nowhere near a desktop scanner. Photographing the page usually isn't good enough: there's a shadow across the paper from your own hand, the edges are crooked, and the file is a heavy, uneven JPEG rather than a tidy document. CleanScan is built for exactly that situation — a scanner that lives in your pocket, produces clean, evenly lit PDFs, and keeps working without a signal or an account.

What CleanScan does, feature by feature

Capture starts with the system document camera, which finds the page edges and lets you add several pages in one pass. From there, everything happens on the device.

• Shadow removal and auto-straighten. A flat-field correction erases the shadow your hand casts so the whole page is evenly lit, and detected edges are de-skewed to a clean rectangle. Mixed page sizes come out as tidy, consistent pages.
• Crisp black-and-white, or colour and greyscale. An adaptive threshold keeps small text sharp while making the background pure white — the difference between a grey phone photo and something that reads like a real scan. Colour and greyscale modes are there when you need them.
• OCR that makes every scan searchable. On-device text recognition reads the words in each document, so your scan history becomes a searchable archive rather than a pile of images. This is the feature that quietly saves the most time (see below).
• A real PDF viewer with full-text search. Open a multi-page document, jump to a page by thumbnail, and search inside it for a word or a number.
• Page management. Reorder pages by dragging, rename documents, and add or remove pages after the fact — so a scan you rushed can be tidied later.
• Password-protected PDFs. Lock a sensitive document with a password; the PDF itself is encrypted, so it stays protected wherever you send it.
• QR and barcode scanning, translate and read-aloud. A built-in scanner reads QR codes and barcodes, recognised text can be translated, and a document can be read aloud — small extras that cover the rest of a paperwork day.

How people actually use it

The clearest fit is anyone who has to scan on the move. Mobile trades and field staff, business travellers who come home with a wallet full of invoices to claim as expenses, secretaries handling paperwork between meetings, and students who don't own a scanner all share the same need: capture a clean document now, file it, and move on. CleanScan does that offline, so a poor signal at a client site or on a plane never gets in the way.

The feature that earns its place shows up months later. Because every scan is run through OCR, the text inside your documents is searchable. When you suddenly need to prove what you spent on a specific day — half a year ago, a year ago, two years ago — you don't leaf through a folder. You search by the date, the amount, or the shop's name, and the matching invoice comes straight back. For anyone who files expense claims or reconciles receipts, that is the difference between a five-minute reimbursement and an afternoon lost to a shoebox of paper.

Why choose CleanScan

What sets CleanScan apart is that the whole workflow stays private and self-contained. Scanning, cleanup, OCR and search all run on the device — there is no account, no server, and nothing is uploaded; a document only leaves your phone when you choose to share it. Sensitive files can be encrypted with a password. And because the scan history is searchable, the app doesn't just make clean PDFs — it keeps every one you've ever made ready to be found again, without handing your records to a cloud service.

Who it's for

People who need PDFs away from a desk: field and mobile workers, frequent business travellers doing expense claims, secretaries and admin staff, small-business owners tracking receipts, and students without a scanner at home. If you've ever needed the right receipt and couldn't find it, this is built for you.

Free, ad-supported. Nothing you scan is uploaded.

FAQ

Does CleanScan upload my documents? No. Scanning, shadow removal and OCR all run on the device — no account, no server. A document only leaves your phone when you choose to share or email it.

Can I find an old scanned invoice later? Yes. OCR makes the text in every scan searchable, so you can pull back an old receipt by the date, the amount, or the shop's name, even months or years later.

Can I password-protect a PDF? Yes. Sensitive documents can be locked with a password, which encrypts the PDF itself so it stays protected wherever you send it.