Your phone already scans documents to PDF, for free.

Open Notes and pick a note or start one. Tap the Attachment button, then Scan Documents. In Auto mode, the page is captured once its edges are found; otherwise tap the shutter, drag the corners to fit the page, and tap Keep. Add more pages, then tap Done: they’re saved as one PDF in the note, and Notes search finds their text.

In the Files app, tap the More button, then Scan Documents. After Done, choose a location and tap Save. On iOS 26 and later, the Preview app scans straight to a PDF too.

Open Google Drive (Google’s help starts by installing it, if it isn’t on your phone) and tap Camera at the bottom right. Choose Auto or Manual capture, then crop, pick a filter, tap Clean to erase stains and fingers, or Add for another page. Save it as a .pdf or .jpg in the Drive folder you pick. A “Drive scan” widget puts the scanner on the home screen, and Drive scans on iPhone too.

• Pixel. Point the Camera app at a document and tap Scan document when the prompt appears.
• Galaxy. In the Camera app, tap Scan. The scan goes to Gallery, and Samsung Notes can export it as a PDF.

• Adobe Scan is free to download. Once you sign in, scans save to Adobe Document Cloud automatically, and you can export them to the phone or another cloud. Its text recognition has a page allowance that a subscription raises “from 5 to 100 pages”, and combining separate scans into one file is a paid feature.
• Genius Scan is free with no limit on documents and no watermark, and documents stay on the phone unless you export them. Text recognition needs Ultra, $39.99 a year.
• CamScanner is free to download, and both app stores mark it as containing ads. It recognizes text, though its listings don’t say which plan that needs. Its App Store listing says documents are stored on the device, and its Google Play listing says signing up syncs them across your devices. Its Premium Account is $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year in the US App Store.

Microsoft retired it. Lens left the App Store and Google Play on February 9, 2026, and stopped making new scans after March 9. Old scans stay readable if the app is still installed and you’re signed in to the account you last used in it. Microsoft points people to the OneDrive app, whose scanner saves to OneDrive and can’t save scans on the phone. On Android, one multi-page scan there holds up to 10 pages.

Doc Scanner is ours. It runs in the phone’s browser and installs to the home screen, where it opens straight to the camera. Finding the edges, straightening the page, evening out shadows and reading the text all happen on your device; text reading downloads about 6 MB of English the first time. The whole app works offline once it has been opened; on iPhone, add it to the Home Screen so Safari keeps its files. Pages save as one PDF with no watermark, and nothing is uploaded. Edit in PDF Kit opens the scan to sign it, number the pages or merge it with other files. For other ways to join PDFs on a phone, see how to merge PDFs on iPhone.

It isn’t free: it comes with implements, $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year for every tool. Doc Scanner has no free version, but PDF Kit’s free merge page joins up to 3 PDFs at a time, scans included.

For an occasional scan, the scanner on your phone is enough, and Genius Scan’s free version also keeps pages on the phone with no watermark. Notes with iCloud, Google Drive and Adobe Scan keep a copy you can open on another device, which Doc Scanner doesn’t, and it reads English only. What it adds is searchable text read on your device at no extra cost, and the same scanner in a computer’s browser.