Paper in, searchable PDF out — with a name that matches what’s inside.
Scanloft is a document scanner for iPhone. Text recognition, naming and PDF creation run entirely on your device. No account, no server, no cloud required.
Coming to the App Store The app is being finished. Write to sebastian@focusislandlabs.com if you want to hear when it launches.
Why another scanner
The usual scanner apps upload your documents to someone else’s server, want an account first, and then file the result as Scan_2026-08-20_001.pdf — a name you won’t recognise six months from now.
Scanloft does both differently. The recognised text stays inside the PDF, so it’s searchable everywhere, and the file name comes from the content. Both happen offline on your iPhone, because tax assessments and medical bills are nobody else’s business.
What the app does
Scan a whole stack
The camera finds the edges and fixes the perspective itself, and stays open between pages. Afterwards the whole stack lands on a review board — a crooked page is one tap from gone.
Genuinely searchable PDFs
The recognised text sits invisibly on exactly the pixels it was read from. You can find and select it anywhere: in Preview, in the Files app, through Spotlight — not just inside this app.
Names from the content
Apple’s on-device language model reads title, sender, type and date from the first pages. The result is 2026-06-04 Tax Assessment 2025.pdf. Without Apple Intelligence, text rules take over — the app works fully without the model.
Your filing stays yours
Flat folders in “On My iPhone” or in iCloud Drive, visible in the Files app. The switch in settings moves your existing library along with it. No database that holds your documents hostage.
Search across everything
Title, sender, file name and the full recognised text, ranked by relevance and shown with the snippet around the match. Inside an open PDF the hits are highlighted.
How it works
- Scan. Camera on, page after page, the stack grows.
- Review. Blurry pages out, “More pages” appends to the stack.
- Let it run. Recognition, naming and the PDF happen on the device.
- Find it again. In the library, by full-text search, or in the Files app.
Who it’s for
Anyone with paper worth keeping: tax records and receipts, invoices and contracts, letters from authorities, medical correspondence, study and training documents.
Privacy isn’t an add-on
- No account, no sign-up, no login.
- No analytics, no tracking, no ads, no third-party SDKs.
- The app never calls an internet address on its own.
- iCloud is optional and off by default — and then it’s your own iCloud.
- Nobody, the developer included, can see what you scan.