If you're interested ingoing paperless, you probably think you need a scanner. It's true that hardware scanners make turning multipage documents into PDFs very simple. But most of us don't have easy access to a scanner.

What we do have arephones, and those phones have very good cameras. That's where scanning apps come in.

These apps allow you to take photos of each page of a paper document, crop out the edges of the photo and straighten everything, then combine those photos into a PDF file. A scanning app is handy, but there's a catch: a lot of the apps out there are a mess.

That's what makesFairScan stand out. It's an app for scanning documents using your Android phone that just ... scans documents. That's it.

FairScan creator Pierre-Yves Nicolas wrotein a blog post last year that he had previously tried several Android apps for scanning documents. "All of them exhibited behaviors that I certainly don't want," he says. These behaviors included obvious things like ads, hidden privacy violations, and shady practices such as storing your documents in the cloud—then using them to train AI—with only a tiny text prompt notifying you this is happening.

FairScan, which is both free and open source, doesn't do any of that. It scans.

Courtesy of Justin Pot

To get started, simply install the app. And yes, it’s Android-only for now, but you can download it from theGoogle Play Store as well asF-Droid, the repository for open source Android apps.

Get the document you want to scan ready, placing it on a flat surface in a well-lit room. Then aim your camera at the first page. A green box will surround the page—adjust until it's surrounding the portion of the document you want to scan. Take the picture when you're ready.

If you have more pages you can click the plus button to add them; this allows you to repeat the process with the next page. You can do this as many times as you want, allowing you to scan a multipage document.

When you're ready, you can export the scanned pages to either a single PDF or multiple JPEG files.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind while scanning. First, lighting is going to matter a lot. You don't want the shadow of your phone to be in the image, so make sure your phone isn’t positioned between your light source and the document you’re scanning. I find the app works best in a room with diffuse lighting, whether that's multiple lights illuminating your work surface, or several windows letting in a great deal of natural sunlight. It's also worth trying to get the paper document as flat as possible, to avoid distortions.

This application is very simple. There are a few features I'd personally like to see added, including the ability to edit pages after taking the photo and some kind of optical character recognition (OCR) that would digitize your scanned text and make it searchable.

But the major pro of the software—that it does its job without bothering you—is the killer feature here. What does it say about the state of the technology ecosystem that I find this such a big deal? A lot, actually.

All of us are hoping to use our phones as a tool—a way to achieve a specific end. And it's easy to also think of the applications you can install as tools. The problem: Most people who make apps aren't in the tool business. They’re offering a nominally useful app in order to extract value from you in other ways—by serving you ads, forcing you into a subscription, or selling your personal data.

This isn't how tools have to work. If you buy a hammer, that hammer doesn't demand that you pay extra if you want to use it to close paint cans. It doesn't pepper you with notifications encouraging you to upgrade to HammerPro™️. You just have a hammer for doing all the hammer things. FairScan is like that, which makes it stand out in an increasinglyenshittified field.