Over the past few months, I’ve been developing FairScan, an open-source Android app to scan documents to PDF.
My main goal was to make it as simple as possible:
a clear scanning process, a clean interface, and fully automatic results: you open the app, take a photo for each page, and get a shareable PDF in just a few seconds.
I wanted an alternative to scanner apps full of ads, trackers, or unnecessary options. FairScan focuses on doing one thing well, while respecting the user.
A few points about the app:
Open source, licensed under GPLv3
No tracking, no data collection
Minimal permissions:
Camera: to capture images
Write external storage (only on Android 9 and below): to save PDFs in the Download directory
Uses a custom image segmentation model trained from a public dataset that I built
Uses a custom post-processing pipeline to automatically enhance scanned pages
Works entirely on-device, with no dependency on external services
Available on F-Droid and Google Play
More information, screenshots, and source links are available on the website: fairscan.org
I also started a small blog there about the project and its philosophy, with thoughts on what it means to build respectful apps.
Feedback from the privacy-conscious community would be very welcome, whether about the app itself or ways to make it even more transparent and privacy-friendly.
Looks interesting. I guess I can use and see for myself. Hope it works well or close to those of some of the paid options on iOS provide (as those are the best I’ve seen).
That may come in the future, but it’s not in my short-term plans, probably because I personally rarely need that myself. If I go for it, I’d want to make sure it has minimal impact on user experience and performance, and that it actually works well. For now, I’m focusing on getting clean PDFs automatically in most conditions.
I didn’t know about Accrescent. I’ll have to look into it, but based on what you said, probably not very soon.
I’d be very interested in such a comparison!
I’ve used OSS Document Scanner, and I think both apps have a different focus. FairScan aims to give users a clean PDF with zero manual tweaks: that’s what I mean by “simple”. It doesn’t mean it’s simple for the app’s developer
Thanks again for the feedback and encouragement, it really means a lot.
Adding my interest into the comparison between this and OSS Document Scanner (my current scanner when I need one). Also want to throw in my support for getting on Accrescent as well.
As for OCR, I use Image Toolbox, and it works just fine. They may have code you could look at incorporating if you wanted to add it. It’s always worked great when I needed it.
I haven’t looked into OCR for now, but I have a question in my mind for people interested in privacy.
For now, FairScan requires very few permissions and not INTERNET, it works 100% offline. I feel this is a strong argument for people caring about privacy.
However, I’m not sure how that can fit with OCR. My understanding is that OCR tools usually require language-specific models (English, Spanish…), and that can be heavy (20 MB per language). So, either the app requires a huge download at installation, or it has to access internet to be able to load language data on demand and it’s not 100% offline any more.
What do you think?
