Private Document Scanner

Think about what actually ends up in a scanning app. Passports and driving licences. Tax forms. Medical letters. Bank statements. Contracts with names and figures in them. The paperwork worth digitising is almost always the paperwork you would least like to hand to a stranger.

Plenty of scanning apps treat that material as something to be uploaded: processed on a server, stored in an account, tied to an email address. Scannera is built the other way round. The processing happens on the phone that took the picture, there is no account to create, and there is no Scannera server holding your documents, because one was never built.

What that leaves is an app that behaves like a tool rather than a service: your files sit in your device's own storage under Android's application sandbox, and they stay there until you export them, back them up deliberately, or delete them. Uninstalling the app clears its local files, cached data and settings from the device.

There is no registration screen. No email address, no password, no profile, no phone number, and no “continue with” button before you can scan something. Install the app and the camera is ready.

That is worth more than the convenience. An account is the thing that links a pile of documents to a person, and gives a company a reason to keep them. With no account, there is no user record to attach your scans to in the first place.

The only place a sign-in appears at all is Google Drive backup, and only if you choose to switch it on, and that signs you in to your own Google account, not to Scannera.

Because the processing is local, the whole scanning workflow runs with the network off. Capture, edge detection, filtering, OCR, annotation, signing, watermarking and PDF export all work in airplane mode, which is both a convenience and a fairly direct demonstration that the work really is happening on your phone.

The offline document scanner page goes step by step through what runs locally and how that compares to cloud-based scanning.

• It is optional. Scannera works completely without it.
• It is off by default. Nothing is backed up unless you turn it on yourself.
• You control it. Automatic backup and Wi-Fi-only transfer are both settings you choose.
• Files go to your own Google Drive. They are synced between your device and your personal Google account. Scannera's developers do not receive, store or have access to your Google credentials or your backed-up files.
• Access is limited. Scannera requests access only to the files it creates in your Drive, so it cannot see the rest of your Drive.
• It uses the internet. This is a cloud feature, and it needs a connection to sync. Turning it on means your PDFs travel to Google's servers under your own account.

Files backed up this way stay in your Drive until you manage or delete them through your Google account. The full description is in the privacy policy.

An app that claimed never to touch the network would be easy to write and untrue. Scannera connects in exactly three situations, and none of them involves the contents of your documents:

• Google Play Billing. Verifying the one-time Pro purchase. Payments are handled entirely by Google Play, and Scannera does not collect or store card details, banking credentials or billing addresses.
• Google Drive sync. Only when you have enabled backup, as described above.
• Diagnostics. Anonymous crash reports and usage analytics (crash logs, hardware model, Android version) used to fix problems across different devices. This contains no document content and no location data.

Everything else runs with the radio off.

Keeping documents off the internet does not help much if anyone holding your unlocked phone can open them. App Lock closes that gap: switch it on and Scannera requires your device screen lock (PIN, pattern, password or fingerprint) before it will open.

It uses Android's own authentication rather than a separate Scannera passcode, so there is no additional secret to set up, remember or lose, and the check is handled by the system rather than by the app.