How do you scan a document on an iPhone without an app?

Apple’s scanner is built into two apps. In Files, tap the More button, then Scan Documents. In Notes, open a note, tap the attachment button and choose Scan Documents.

Hold the phone over the page. In Auto mode it captures by itself; otherwise tap the shutter or press a volume button. Drag the corners if the edges are off, tap Keep Scan, add more pages, then Save. From Files, the result is a PDF wherever you chose to put it — On My iPhone keeps it off iCloud.

Steps from Apple’s own support page, checked on 3 October 2026.

How do you scan a document on Android?

Most Android phones come with Google Drive, which has a scanner: tap the camera button, capture the page, then crop, adjust colors or clean up stains and fingers before saving it as a PDF. Some phone makers also put a document mode in their own camera or files app.

Drive saves the scan into your Google Drive, which means your Google account holds a copy. For an ID card, a medical letter or a bank form you would rather keep on the phone only, the browser scanner above saves straight to the device.

How do you get a clean, readable scan?

Most bad scans come down to light and angle, not the phone:

  • Use daylight or a bright room, and switch the flash off: it leaves a glare spot right where the text is.
  • Hold the phone parallel to the page. A tilted shot can be straightened, but the far edge stays softer than the near one.
  • Fill the frame with the page, and keep your fingers and your phone’s shadow out of it.
  • Flatten curled pages, and scan a bound book one page at a time — a curve near the spine stays curved.
  • Before you send it, zoom in on the smallest print: a reference number, a date, a footnote.

What if the scan is too big to send?

Every page of a scan is a photograph, so a short document can easily run to several megabytes. PDF Workflow compresses it to a size you type, adds page numbers if the form wants them, and can lock it with a password — in one pass, on the phone.

Choosing Black & white when you scan helps too: text scanned in two tones is far smaller than the same page in full color, and usually easier to read.

Can you make the scanned text searchable?

Not in the scan itself: it is pictures of pages, so you can’t search or copy the words yet. Run the saved PDF through the OCR PDF tool, which reads the text on your device and lays it invisibly behind each page.