FaxFlow: Send Fax from Phone

Review by eFreeware

FaxFlow is an Android app from Mobile Flow Ltd that turns a phone into a fax line. You scan a document, enter a fax number and the app sends it, and it can also give you a US number so faxes come to you instead. The pitch is simple: no fax machine, no landline, and a job that takes about a minute.

That is a narrow job, and the developer is upfront about it. Plenty of offices still ask for a fax, and the people most likely to need one are dealing with tax forms, medical records, insurance claims, signed contracts or bank paperwork. If you are in that position and the nearest print shop is a detour, having the whole thing on your phone is the main reason to consider this app.

More than 100,000 installs and a 4.8 average across nearly 30,000 ratings suggest a lot of people have found it useful for exactly that errand. It is free to download and carries no ads, though sending and receiving sit behind a subscription.

Scanning a page and getting it delivered

The feature the developer leads with is the one I would judge the app on: sending a fax. You point the camera at a paper document and the app scans it, with automatic edge detection and cleanup, so a form photographed on a desk should come out looking like a page rather than a snapshot. That matters because the receiving office is usually a bureaucracy that will reject anything it cannot read.

You can also skip the camera entirely. PDF, JPG and PNG files can be attached from the phone or from Google Drive, which is the route I would expect most people to take for anything they already have digitally, such as a signed contract or a downloaded statement.

Your name, number and a brief note can go on a cover page. It is a small thing, but faxes to government offices and medical practices often get filed by hand, and a cover page is how the person on the other end knows what they are holding.

Each fax comes with a delivery receipt that can be shared. That receipt is the part I would value most, because it is the evidence that the document arrived when someone later claims it did not. If a fax fails, the app retries on its own rather than leaving you to notice and start again.

Receiving faxes on a US number

The other half of the service is inbound. A US fax number is included, and anything sent to it triggers an instant notification. For anyone who deals with an office that insists on sending paperwork back by fax, this removes the need to be near a machine at the right moment.

Sending covers fax numbers in the US and Canada as well as internationally, so the app is not limited to one country's traffic. The developer describes faxes as encrypted in transit and carried over dedicated phone lines, and notes that this is part of why medical, legal and government offices continue to use fax at all. I would treat that as the developer's framing of the service rather than a guarantee about any particular recipient's handling of your document.

The combination of sending and receiving is what separates this from simply photographing a form and emailing it. Some offices will not accept email, and a fax number that works in both directions means you can hold up your end of that exchange from a phone.

What the subscription covers

Downloading costs nothing, and scanning, cover pages and fax preparation are free. A paid subscription covers sending and receiving, since each fax runs over real phone lines the company pays for. Weekly, monthly and annual plans are on offer, and the developer says you can cancel at any time.

Send a single fax on the weekly plan, then cancel it. That is a reasonable fit for an occasional errand, though it is worth reading the terms of whichever plan you pick before you commit.

The app offers in-app purchases and shows no advertising. The developer's contact route is inside the app under Settings, or through the company's website.

Getting a fax out the door without trouble

Because the app is built around one task, most of the practical advice is about the document rather than the software. Scan in decent light and check the preview before you send: edge detection and cleanup help, but a page photographed at an angle in a dim room is still going to be a poor fax, and a rejected form means starting over.

If you already have the document as a file, attach it instead of rescanning. A PDF that came straight from a bank or an insurer will be cleaner than anything a phone camera produces, and it saves you the step of printing something just to photograph it.

It helps to know the recipient's fax number before you begin, since the whole process is built around entering it and sending. Adding a cover page with your name and number is worth the extra moment for anything going to a records office, where the document may sit in a queue before anyone looks at it.

Finally, keep the delivery receipt. It is the simplest way to answer a later question about whether something arrived, and it costs nothing to hold on to.

A focused tool for the offices that still ask for fax

FaxFlow does one job and does not pretend otherwise. It suits people who occasionally have to send paperwork to an office that only accepts fax: a tax filing, a prescription, an insurance claim, a signed agreement, a bank form. For those errands, having scanning, sending, receiving and a delivery receipt in one place on a phone is genuinely more convenient than finding a machine.

The subscription is the main thing to weigh. Sending and receiving are not free, and the cost only makes sense if you expect to fax more than once in a while, or if you want a US number that faxes can arrive on. The developer's weekly option is there for the one-off case.

If your paperwork regularly lands at a fax-only office, this is a straightforward thing to keep on your phone. If faxing is a once-a-year event, the weekly plan is the sensible way in.

What's new in version 1.2.5

FaxFlow is being constantly improved to deliver the best experience to all of our users. This version includes bug fixes and general improvements. Enjoy FaxFlow!