Adobe Scan
Free phone scanner that turns paper into searchable PDFs in Adobe's cloud.
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsconverting scanned documents into editable, searchable PDF files using OCR, optical character recognition, in the Adobe Scan app on iOS 15 or later and Android 8.0 or later, with scans stored in Adobe Document Cloud
Convert
Browse all convert toolsconverting captures of documents, forms, business cards and whiteboards into PDFs in Adobe Scan, and exporting scanned files from Adobe Scan as PDF, JPEG or Word
Where your files are processed
Reported to upload your files
The vendor states that files are uploaded to their servers. We have not independently tested this.
Capture and image cleanup happen in the app, but Adobe's own FAQ says finished scans are stored in Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe's privacy policy says files are stored on Adobe's servers. The pages never say where the OCR itself runs.
What it does
Adobe Scan is a phone camera scanner: it captures pages, whiteboards, forms and business cards, corrects perspective, glare and shadows, and produces PDFs, JPEGs or Word files with OCR so the text is searchable and editable. It offers markup, custom filenames and folders, and hands scans to Acrobat on desktop, web or mobile.
Signing in with an Adobe ID makes the same scans available across devices through Adobe Document Cloud.
Best for
Phone-first users already in Adobe's ecosystem who want quick, good-looking scans that flow straight into Acrobat for signing and form filling.
Worth knowing
The app is free but the things people want next - combining files, converting formats, password protection, advanced editing - are pushed into a paid Acrobat Pro subscription. Finished scans are stored in Adobe Document Cloud, and the same FAQ lists local storage on the device as an export destination alongside the Adobe account and connected services.
Cloud-backed storage and where a file can be exported are different questions. An export to the device does not establish that capture, recognition or storage happened offline, and the paid Acrobat operations are separate from what Scan does.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- iOS · Android
- Website
- adobe.com
- Requires an account
- Not verified
- Free tier
- Yes
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Not verified
- Data residency
- Multiple regions
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- No
- Licence
- Not verified
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 15 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish
Read from an Internet Archive snapshot, because every Adobe URL refuses this project - Akamai answers a headless browser with "Access Denied", and later at the protocol level. Adobe’s own Scan page describes capturing, cleaning up and exporting scans and does not mention redaction; the separate desktop Acrobat Pro redaction feature is recorded on that record, not this one.
The vendor’s own published material was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist - it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach - but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote.
Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.
https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/mobile/scanner-app.html
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
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“Adobe Scan is completely free to download.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence sits under an H2 reading "Free to download.", and the sentence after it is the one a reader should have - "Create scans and share your PDFs with a few clicks. Want to do even more?
Start a free trial of Adobe Acrobat Pro to combine files, convert documents to different formats, protect PDFs with passwords, and access advanced editing tools across device." So "completely free" is true of the scanner and the page immediately offers the paid product for everything past scanning. That is not a contradiction and it is a boundary worth stating: the app is free, the capabilities beyond capture are not.
Standing: Re-read and matched once per-response tokens were masked
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- 491e8d25fde608c70f4d11f339a98baf27e9520f5d4734c531fba3386f8eb1d3
How we checked
Same page and same read as the Adobe Scan storage claim verified earlier in this campaign: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/mobile/scanner-app.html, which renders 204 bytes of visible text even after a 45 second wait, so it was read from the raw HTML response (25692 bytes, SHA-256 491e8d25fde608c70f4d11f339a98baf27e9520f5d4734c531fba3386f8eb1d3). Two claims were read from one fetch of one page.
-
“Your scans are stored in your Adobe Document Cloud storage, accessible only to you unless you choose to share them.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 21 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim. The sentence sits in an FAQ answer headed "Does Adobe Scan store content securely?", immediately after "Adobe Scan encrypts files in transit and at rest to keep your content private." Two things follow from reading it in place rather than in isolation.
First, the claim is the second half of a two-sentence security answer, so the storage statement is offered alongside an in-transit and at-rest encryption statement rather than on its own. Second, the same FAQ block gives the platform limits - Adobe Scan is "compatible with: iOS 15 or later, Android 8.0 or later" - and says an Adobe ID gives access to the same files on desktop and mobile through the Acrobat web app, which is what makes "your Adobe Document Cloud storage" meaningful: the scans are in an account, not on the device.
Recorded as the vendor's description; we have not installed the app and no control was run.
Standing: Re-read and matched once per-response tokens were masked
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the raw HTTP response
- SHA-256
- 491e8d25fde608c70f4d11f339a98baf27e9520f5d4734c531fba3386f8eb1d3
How we checked
adobe.com/acrobat/mobile/scanner-app.html renders almost nothing: headless Chrome produced 204 bytes of visible text even with a 45 second wait, because the FAQ the sentence sits in is not in the rendered document. The claim was therefore read from the raw HTML response the server actually sends, saved as 25692 bytes and hashed, where the sentence appears inside an FAQ answer. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of that raw response.
This is the one entry in this batch whose hash is of markup rather than of rendered text, and the finding says so.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.