Best Document Scanning Apps for Android and iPhone.

Scanning documents and paper records is considered one of the tasks that our smartphones are now capable of thanks to the significant advancements in camera quality and performance in modern smartphones. In today’s digital world, it has become essential to digitize various types of documents for easier sharing, remote collaboration, and protection against loss or damage.

Many individuals and organizations need to convert various types of paper documents into digital copies for various reasons, such as:

• The need to create a digital archive on the internet for newspapers and paper magazines.
• Converting printed books to e-books for easier distribution.
• Sharing documents and records worldwide at a lower cost.
• Requesting services or approvals from government/private entities, such as submitting resumes for job applications or applying for scholarships, training courses, or academic certificates.

In summary, converting paper documents, books, and records into digital copies has become a vital necessity for various institutions and individuals. In the past, the only way was to use a computer connected to a scanner. Now, with smartphones equipped with good cameras and dedicated scanning apps, scanning paper documents is much easier and more convenient. Below, we present a list of the best scanning apps available for both Android and iPhone devices.

The Microsoft Lens app is one of the best scanning apps designed for smartphones, offering a range of fantastic features. In addition to its ease of use, the Microsoft Lens app allows you to capture paper documents, images, and even whiteboards, with the ability to edit, annotate, crop, control colors, and adjust lighting. The app also features Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality to convert printed or handwritten text into editable characters, extract contact information and phone numbers from personal or business cards for direct storage in the phone’s contact list.

The app allows you to save and transfer images to the photo gallery, studio, or to the cloud storage service “OneDrive” directly after capture and processing. It enables you to control the quality of images and convert them to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, or OneNote files before saving, and even allows you to make multiple copies of a single document in different formats and save them in various locations. The app is completely free, available for download and installation on both Android and iPhone devices, and is ad-free, making it the optimal choice for a portable scanning app on a smartphone.

The Adobe Scan app is another free app that can be used for scanning documents and paper records on smartphones. The app features a very user-friendly interface and comes with many tools and features that allow image cropping, rotation, color adjustment, clarity enhancement, and OCR to extract and edit written text, as well as password protection for scanned files.

Once images are captured, edited, and processed, the app automatically saves the scanned copies to the Adobe Document Cloud platform, where users can access, retrieve, and download them on any other phone or mobile device. Users can also keep copies on the phone or share them in various formats such as JPG and PDF, and in formats compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader and other Adobe products. The Adobe Scan app is available for free download and installation on both Android and iPhone devices, with the option to subscribe to the Adobe PDF package for additional features and tools.

The CamScanner app offers a wide range of professional tools and features, including image editing, OCR for extracting text from images, smart cropping, automatic enhancement of image quality, advanced annotations, keyword search, and additional functions like scanning QR codes and converting files from one format to another. The app allows users to save and transfer documents to the phone after capture and processing, or to Evernote, email, social media applications, or automatically upload up to 10GB of files to cloud storage platforms like Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox. It also offers the ability to convert files to different formats before saving or sharing, but it adds a small watermark to scanned documents. The CamScanner app is available for free download on both Android and iPhone devices, with some features requiring payment for additional use.

The Genius Scan Ultra app stands out for its ability to scan multi-page documents quickly using the built-in batch scanning tool. It features smart page detection and correction to ensure even skewed pages are captured accurately. The app then saves the final copies as multi-page files, making it especially suitable for scanning books, magazines, newspapers, and multi-page documents.

The Genius Scan Ultra app can also process images after they are individually or batched from the photo gallery, studio, or any other location on the phone. It allows users to save documents as images in JPEG or PDF format, share them via email or social media apps, or automatically download them to cloud storage platforms like Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud Drive. It also offers additional features such as document organization, keyword search, and file password protection.

The SwiftScan app offers a unique set of features that may not be available in many other apps, such as built-in scanning tools for QR codes and barcodes, document organization tools, watermark removal, and additional features like OCR and encrypted PDF files. The app allows users to scan various types of documents and even optical boards, then edit and improve image quality, control clarity, colors, lighting, and add annotations and effects, and save or share documents in JPG or PDF format. The SwiftScan app is free to download on both Android and iPhone devices, with the option to upgrade to the paid version for additional features.