ScanBasic — every scanner feature you need, with no catch.

Available now for iPhone. Download ScanBasic from the App Store.

ScanBasic is a document scanner for iPhone. It is for the paperwork of everyday life — receipts, bills, forms, letters and school notes — and for anyone who wants to scan, find, sign and share a document without a subscription, ads or an account. “Basic” means no nonsense, not no features.

ScanBasic requires an iPhone running iOS 18 or later.

The whole app, with no catch

• Free. There is no paid tier, trial, feature gate, page limit or watermark.
• No ads. ScanBasic contains no advertising.
• No subscriptions. Nothing recurs and there is nothing to cancel.
• No ScanBasic account. The app works without signing up. Sync uses the Apple Account already on your iPhone.
• Nothing functional to buy. Every feature is available without a purchase.
• No app analytics or tracking. ScanBasic contains no analytics or tracking SDK. The BasicApps production website uses cookieless aggregate analytics and ordinary hosting logs, as explained in ScanBasic privacy.

Scan and search

Scan multi-page documents with the iPhone’s document camera, or import photos and PDFs. ScanBasic recognises the text on every page on your iPhone and keeps each document as a searchable PDF, so a search finds the words inside your documents as well as their titles.

Organise

Put each document in a folder and label it with coloured tags, then filter the library with a tap.

Sign, mark up and share

Sign a document with your finger and place the signature where it belongs. Mark up pages with Apple’s markup tools. Share a PDF through the share sheet and, when it matters, protect the shared copy with a password.

Your iPhone and your own iCloud

When your iPhone is signed in to iCloud, ScanBasic syncs your library through Apple’s CloudKit to the private database of your own iCloud account, and every iPhone on the same Apple Account keeps the whole library. Your documents also appear in the Files app under On My iPhone → ScanBasic, and the library keeps working when iCloud is unavailable.

Your documents stay on your iPhone and in your own iCloud; ScanBasic has no servers and the developer cannot see them.

App Lock can require Face ID or your passcode every time ScanBasic opens.

Honest limits

ScanBasic is for iPhone only; there is no iPad, Mac, Android or web app. Text recognition uses Apple’s Vision framework and is set up for English first, so handwriting and other languages may be recognised less reliably. Signing is self-signing only.

Every iPhone on your Apple Account downloads the whole library. A PDF over 50 MB stays on the iPhone that made it, and when your iCloud storage is full, changes stay on the iPhone and sync when space is available. Your documents are not visible in iCloud Drive or on a Mac or iCloud.com; to put a copy in iCloud Drive, share it and choose Save to Files.

Read ScanBasic support, ScanBasic privacy and the ScanBasic terms of use.