Best Free OCR Apps for iPhone and Android

Disclosure first: SwipeScan appears in this list and it is our app. It is ranked last on the criterion this article ranks by, because it has zero ratings, and that is where it belongs. Everything else here is somebody else’s work, and several of them are better than ours in ways this piece says out loud.

A scoping note too. The figures below come from the iTunes Search and Lookup API, US storefront, pulled 6 September 2026 — so they are iPhone numbers. We did not pull Google Play ratings, and Play ratings for the same app are often materially different. Where the article says “1.8 million ratings”, read “1.8 million US App Store ratings”.

The two entries that beat the rest

Live Text (iOS 15 and later). Free, built in, no install. It works in Photos, Camera, Quick Look and Safari: press and hold on text in an image and drag the selection handles like it was a web page. Apple’s feature availability page lists 46 language and regional variants for it, and it is on the device already.

Google Lens (Android, and the Google app on iOS). Free, built into Google Photos and the Google app. Same gesture, same result, and it will translate the text as well. On roughly 100 Android device models Circle to Search reaches it without opening an app at all.

These are not the polite mention before the real list. They are the correct answer for most people most of the time, and the honest reason to read further is that they have specific failure modes: they hand you a text selection rather than a structured result, they cannot be constrained to digits only, and they do nothing about multi-page documents. Copying text from a screenshot covers the built-in route in detail on all four operating systems. That digits-only constraint is a narrower search with its own answer — and what the App Store returns for a number scanner is not what you would expect.

Microsoft Lens is gone

It used to top every list like this one, so it is worth being precise rather than leaving a dead recommendation in circulation. Per Microsoft’s own retirement notice:

• 9 January 2026 — the app was retired from iOS and Android.
• 9 February 2026 — removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play, and no longer supported.
• 9 March 2026 — scanning stopped. Existing scans remain viewable if the app is still installed and you are signed in.

Microsoft’s recommended replacement is the OneDrive app, which has scanning built in. If an article published after March 2026 still recommends Microsoft Lens, it was not checked.

The ranking

Ordered by App Store rating count, which is the least gameable signal available. “OCR claimed” means the app’s own store description uses the words OCR or text recognition. “UI langs” counts interface localisations, not the languages the recognition engine reads — only iScanner and Luni’s Scanner publish anything about the second, and CamScanner’s 57 interface languages should not be read as 57 OCR languages.

#	App	Rating	Ratings	Size	UI langs	OCR claimed
1	CamScanner	4.8	1,887,008	367 MB	57	Yes
2	Adobe Scan	4.9	1,586,323	396 MB	19	Yes
3	QR Reader for iPhone	4.7	1,429,842	387 MB	29	Yes
4	iScanner	4.8	1,399,361	298 MB	21	Yes
5	Genius Scan	4.9	1,358,973	97 MB	20	Yes
6	Scan Hero	4.7	241,859	245 MB	14	Yes
7	Scanner (Luni)	4.7	222,163	164 MB	20	Yes
8	Tiny Scanner	4.8	181,554	179 MB	16	Yes
9	ScanGuru	4.6	93,043	46 MB	14	Yes
10	SwipeScan (ours)	—	0	104 MB	1	Yes

Ratings cluster between 4.6 and 4.9 across the whole table, which tells you almost nothing — App Store ratings are prompted at moments of success and compress upward. The columns that separate these apps are size, languages and what the paywall covers.

What each one is actually for

CamScanner — 4.8 from 1,887,008 people, 57 interface languages, the widest localisation in the set by a distance. If you need the app itself in a language the others do not carry, this is the shortlist of one. It is 367 MB, and the listing does not say how many languages its OCR handles.

Adobe Scan — 4.9 from 1,586,323, and the description is explicit about turning images to text and editing handwritten text. The largest app here at 396 MB, and it wants an Adobe account. Sensible if you live in Acrobat, heavy otherwise. Note the minos figure: it requires iOS 18, the highest bar in the table alongside iScanner.

QR Reader for iPhone — 4.7 from 1,429,842. Genuinely a barcode app that grew a document scanner and an AI assistant that runs OCR on scans. It is here because the rating count is real, but 387 MB is a lot to carry for OCR that is not the app’s centre of gravity.

iScanner — 4.8 from 1,399,361, and the only listing that quantifies its own OCR: text extraction “in 20+ languages”. Also iOS 18 minimum.

Genius Scan — 4.9 from 1,358,973, and 97 MB. That is a quarter of Adobe Scan’s footprint at the same rating from a comparable number of people, with on-device processing and Face ID locking called out in the listing. If you want one document scanner and no opinions about it, this is the one to try first.

Scan Hero (245 MB) and Scanner by Luni (164 MB) sit in the same band with a quarter of the reviews. Luni’s listing names its OCR languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese “and more” — which is more than most disclose.

Tiny Scanner — 4.8 from 181,554, 179 MB despite the name, with OCR plus PDF-to-Word conversion.

ScanGuru — 4.6 from 93,043 and 46 MB, the smallest app in the list that still claims OCR. The lowest rating here, and the description promises OCR, translation and Word export, which is a lot for the size.

SwipeScan — ours. Zero ratings, one language, 104 MB. It does one thing the others do not: you swipe over a region and only that region is copied, rather than getting the whole page as prose. That is the entire argument for it, and it is not enough to displace a free built-in tool for most people. Zero ratings means nobody has independently confirmed any of this.

The one worth knowing about that has no OCR

TurboScan is 4.9 from 296,099 ratings on its $14.99 Pro listing and 4.9 from 101,971 on the free one, it is 10 MB, and it collects no data. Its App Store description never mentions OCR or text recognition. It makes PDFs, beautifully, and it will not hand you text. It is excluded from the ranking above for that reason, and included here because it is frequently recommended by people who have not checked.

Photomyne is the same trap in a different genre — 4.7 from 95,161, and it digitises printed photographs with no text extraction claimed at all.

When a free app is the wrong tool

Three cases where none of the above is the right answer.

Numbers rather than prose. A general OCR engine returns the label, the currency symbol and the digits together, and it can return an O where a 0 belongs because nothing forbids it. Constraining the engine to a digit alphabet removes that error class instead of reducing it — the reasoning is in why OCR gets numbers wrong.

Text you cannot select in the first place. Screenshot-blocked apps, PDFs with user-select disabled, images of text inside desktop software. Copying text that cannot be copied covers what still works there.

You are on a desktop with a file already in hand. Installing a phone app to read a file on your laptop is the long way round. The screenshot-to-text tool on this site runs in the browser tab, processes locally, and needs no account — its English model covers most Latin-script text and is unreliable outside it, which is a genuine limitation next to Live Text’s 46 locales.

Whichever route you take, the input matters more than the engine. A screenshot at native resolution beats a photograph of a screen every time, and a photograph taken across a room will fail on any app in this article. That is worth more than the choice between the screenshot text extractor and anything in the table.

The short version

• Live Text on iOS and Google Lens on Android are free, built in, and Apple lists 46 locales for Live Text alone. Start there.
• Microsoft Lens was retired 9 January 2026, delisted 9 February 2026, and stopped scanning 9 March 2026. Microsoft points to OneDrive instead.
• Ratings run 4.6 to 4.9 across every app in the table, so rank on size, languages and paywall rather than stars.
• Genius Scan gets the most done per megabyte: 4.9 from 1.35 million ratings at 97 MB. CamScanner wins on interface languages with 57.
• TurboScan and Photomyne have superb ratings and no OCR claim in their listings. Ours has the feature and no ratings at all.