Tech: Adobe just launched a free app that turns your phone into a document scanner

Adobe Scan uses your phone's camera to scan printed documents and convert them into digital files.

Thanks to Adobe's new app, you'll never need to painstakingly scan in documents ever again.

Called Adobe Scan, the app is able to snap photos of paper documents and turn them into PDFs on your phone, no scanner required.

The app uses what Adobe calls "advanced image processing technology" powered by Adobe's AI and machine learning arm, Sensei, to take a photo and turn it into a perfectly rendered PDF.

Once your document is scanned, the app will turn the text on the page into searchable digital text. You can highlight, annotate, and edit the text, and the documents upload to the Adobe Document Cloud so you can access them on desktop as well.

Here's a video of the app in action:

I downloaded the app this morning and gave it a try and the results are impressive. After snapping a photo, the app will immediately crop out everything but the document and render it as a PDF in seconds. One thing to note, however, is that in order to edit or annotate the PDF on your phone, you'll have to download the Adobe Acrobat app, which is also free.

Adobe Scan is similar to an app Google launched last November called PhotoScan, which digitizes film photos by scanning them and removing glare. The photos will upload to your Google Photos library so you can access them on mobile and desktop.

While the apps do slightly different things, they both have the same goal: Ensuring you never have to hunt down a scanner again.

Adobe Scan is free to download and is available for both Android and iOS devices.

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