MakeACopy
MakeACopy is an open-source offline document scanner with OCR for Android, designed for privacy-friendly and self-hosted document workflows.
It allows you to digitize paper documents into searchable PDFs while
keeping the entire processing pipeline on your device. The app works
completely offline and avoids any cloud services, telemetry, or tracking.
MakeACopy is designed to be a reliable building block for privacy-friendly
document workflows, especially when combined with self-hosted storage
systems.
Looking for a Microsoft Lens alternative?
With the discontinuation of Microsoft Lens, many users are looking for a reliable way to scan documents on Android.
MakeACopy offers the same core building blocks — document scanning, OCR, and searchable PDF export — while following a fundamentally different design:
- Fully offline – no cloud services required
- No tracking or telemetry
- Open source and auditable
- Designed for long-term, self-hosted workflows
Instead of integrating into a cloud ecosystem, MakeACopy focuses on local processing and interoperability with tools like SambaLite, paperless-ngx, and Syncthing.
This makes it especially suitable for users who prefer control, privacy, and predictable behavior over cloud-based convenience features.
Mobile Document Pipeline
MakeACopy can be combined with
SambaLite to create a fully automated
mobile document workflow:
Paper document
↓
Scan with MakeACopy
↓
Inbox folder
↓
SambaLite folder sync
↓
NAS / archive (e.g. paperless-ngx)
This setup effectively turns your smartphone into a privacy-friendly mobile
network scanner for self-hosted document archives.
Design Philosophy
MakeACopy treats privacy and offline operation as technical design decisions, not as moral or political statements.
The app works fully offline, is open source, and avoids tracking or cloud services because this results in a simpler, more robust, and more auditable system.
Users are encouraged to evaluate MakeACopy based on its concrete features and implementation rather than on positioning or narratives.
App Size Note
To ensure fully offline operation, MakeACopy bundles OCR language models, fonts, and image processing components locally.
This significantly increases the app size, but avoids any cloud dependencies or on-demand downloads.
100 MB are not a sign of excess, but of consistency.
Editions
MakeACopy is available in two editions (controlled via the Gradle property edition):
| Edition | OCR Languages | Fonts | APK Size (arm64-v8a) |
|---|
| Full | all PaddleOCR language groups (Latin, English, Chinese/Japanese, East Slavic, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Greek) | none (glyphless text layer) | ~108 MB |
| Light | Latin script only (English, German, French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, …) | none (glyphless text layer) | ~42 MB |
Both editions include the same ML-based document detection (ONNX model), image processing, and full offline functionality. Both editions use an operator-stripped ONNX Runtime build that includes only the operators required for document detection and PaddleOCR. Inference runs on the ONNX Runtime CPU execution provider in both editions; XNNPACK and NNAPI are not built in (they brought no benefit for the bundled models, see "How the app uses the model"). The Light edition ships only the PaddleOCR Latin recognition model.
OCR runs on PaddleOCR V5 in both editions. The Full edition is what is published on F-Droid and Google Play; the Light edition is available via GitHub Releases.
Prefer a scanner without options? See Sheet, a simpler sibling of MakeACopy.
Or download the latest APK from the Releases Section.
Official app ID: de.schliweb.makeacopy (Light edition: de.schliweb.makeacopy.light).
MakeACopy is only distributed via F-Droid, Google Play under this ID, and
GitHub Releases of this repository. Apps with the same name but a different
package ID or developer are not affiliated with this project.
APK Verification
All official releases of MakeACopy are signed with one of the following certificates:
-
Upload key (used for GitHub releases, F-Droid, and sideload APKs)
SHA-256: AE:32:2D:3F:B7:1A:FE:21:DF:47:27:E3:7A:5C:68:03:51:1D:5A:2F:E1:FC:31:35:43:0C:EE:06:99:FA:1B:34
-
Google Play App Signing key (used for Play Store releases)
SHA-256: C0:71:44:39:CB:51:62:32:A4:47:91:7A:6F:C2:28:1E:45:FA:AA:DD:37:F8:30:B1:01:1F:B4:85:68:8E:0D:64
Verify with apksigner
apksigner verify --print-certs MakeACopy-vX.Y.Z.apk
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