PDF Scanner - Reader

Review by eFreeware

PDF Scanner is a free Android app from the developer Al Fayrouz, listed under Tools, that acts as a single place to open the office documents that land on your phone. The pitch is breadth: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and plain text files all open inside one viewer, and the app also scans your device so those files are gathered into folders rather than scattered across storage. For anyone who regularly receives attachments and has no intention of opening a laptop to deal with them, that combination is the main draw.

The app has been installed more than a million times and holds a 3.3 average from 1,602 ratings, with 72 written reviews. It is built around convenience and format coverage rather than polish, with support for many file types.

I'll go through what the app does file type by file type, then look at the PDF tools, the cost, and how it stacks up against the alternatives you might already have on your phone.

Reading PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files

The core of the app is a viewer for the formats most offices run on: PDF, DOC and DOCX, XLS and XLSX, PPT, and TXT. The developer describes dedicated viewing modes for each, with Word documents presented in what is called a simple reading interface and PowerPoint files displayed in high definition. The promise is that you can open a spreadsheet or a slide deck straight from your phone without hunting for a converter first.

Around the viewer sits a document manager. The app scans your device automatically and sorts what it finds into folders, so PDFs sit under a PDF folder and so on, and everything is also listed in one place for browsing. You can search for files from inside the app or from outside it, mark documents as favorites for quick reopening, and sort listings by name, file size, modification time or access time. Renaming, deleting and sharing files are handled here too, which makes the app a lightweight file manager as much as a reader.

For reading itself, PDF pages can be zoomed freely, and a PDF can be shared with someone else in a single tap. That is a modest set of reading features, but it covers the basics: find the file, open it, adjust the view, pass it on. The folder structure and the favorites list are the parts I'd expect to matter most day to day, because they cut down the time spent locating a document you already know you have.

Converting images, PDFs and Word files

Conversion is where the app tries to do more than read. Images in JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP and WEBP formats can be turned into PDFs, and the developer frames this as both an image-to-PDF tool and a scan-to-PDF tool for capturing documents with the camera. In the other direction, a PDF can be exported to JPG or PNG and saved straight to your photo album. Word files can also be converted to PDF. Converted files can be shared with one tap.

That set of conversions covers the errands people actually run into: turning a photographed receipt or whiteboard into something sendable, pulling a page out of a PDF as an image for a message or a slide, or handing someone a PDF version of a Word document. None of it requires a desktop, which is the point of the app.

These are conversions in the plain sense, not a design tool. What the app promises is a quick path from one common format to another, with the result saved where you can find it.

Editing, signing and assembling PDFs

The PDF tools go past viewing. You can create a PDF, merge several together, split one apart, or compress it to a smaller size. Blank pages and images can be inserted into an existing document. On the editing side, text and formatting can be changed, and new text can be added with control over font size, color, layout and position. Electronic signatures can be placed on a document, and you can annotate or doodle on pages.

For a free viewer, that is a broader toolkit than I'd expect. Signing and annotating in particular are the features that turn a reader into something you can use to finish a piece of paperwork: initial a contract, mark up a draft, add a note before sending it back. Merging and splitting are the other practical pair, useful for combining scanned pages into one file or pulling a single section out of a long report.

The trade-off with a toolkit this wide is that each tool is likely to be simpler than a dedicated app for the same job. The developer's emphasis is on having the option available on your phone, not on matching what specialist desktop software can do. I'd treat the editing features as a way to handle small, urgent changes rather than as a replacement for proper document software.

What it costs and what comes with it

PDF Scanner is free to download, and it carries ads. There are no in-app purchases, so nothing is sold inside the app and there is no paid tier. The cost of using it is the ads it carries.

There is one practical requirement to plan for. On Android 11 and later, reading and editing files on your device requires the Manage External Storage permission. The developer states that this permission is used only for that purpose. It is a broad permission, so it is worth knowing about before you install.

The app was released on June 29, 2026 and last updated on July 29, 2026, with the recent changes described only as fixes to improve the experience.

How it compares with what you already have

Most phones ship with some way to open a PDF, and many people have a word processor or a cloud storage app that previews office files. The case for installing PDF Scanner is that it puts every common format behind one icon and adds tools those built-in viewers tend not to have: merging, splitting, compressing, signing, converting between images and PDFs, and converting Word documents.

Against a dedicated PDF editor, the difference is depth. A dedicated editor will typically give you more control over layout, forms and export settings. Against a dedicated office suite, the difference is weight: this app is presented as compact and lightweight, concerned with opening and lightly touching up documents rather than authoring them from scratch. If your needs sit in the middle, reading and small edits on files you receive, the all-in-one approach is the more convenient one.

The other comparison worth making is with doing nothing. If documents rarely reach your phone, or you are happy to wait until you are at a computer, the app has little to offer you. Its value scales with how often you are away from a desk with a file that needs opening, signing or sending back.

A practical pick for documents on the go

PDF Scanner is worth installing if your phone is where documents arrive and where you need to deal with them. The combination of broad format support, automatic folder sorting, search, favorites and a genuine set of PDF tools covers the common jobs: opening an attachment, converting a photo into a PDF, merging a few scans, signing something and sending it back. It is free, and it carries ads.

The caveats are straightforward. The average rating is middling, the app asks for a broad storage permission on modern Android, and the editing and conversion tools are best thought of as convenient rather than comprehensive. Anyone whose work depends on precise document formatting will still want proper software for the heavy lifting.

For students collecting lecture handouts, people handling invoices and contracts from their phone, or anyone who wants one app to open whatever file type shows up, this is a reasonable thing to try. It is a viewer and a light toolkit first, and it should be judged on those terms.

What's new in version 1.1.2

Fixed some issues to optimize user experience