At a bare minimum, we looked for a promise that apps won’t sell or share your data without consent.

Attention to security: We were skeptical of apps that encourage you (or require you) to upload your scans to their own cloud servers for storage and OCR, as well as those that don’t provide clear security and privacy policies.

Diverse format options: You’ll probably end up scanning text documents and receipts most of the time, but a good scanning app should also be adept at capturing material from less-common sources such as whiteboards, book pages, newspaper and magazine articles, and business cards.

If the app can automatically back up scans to cloud storage, all the better.

Ample sharing options: A good scanning app provides a convenient way to share your scans and OCR results on all the channels you like to use-email, Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, printers, faxes, and more.

Some apps export raw text (either as a TXT file or copied to the clipboard), while others provide formatted text in RTF or DOC files.

Accurate text recognition: The best scanning apps use optical character recognition (OCR) to locate text in an image and convert it to an editable document.

Different apps provide different scan resolutions and different filters, some of which are better than others at smoothing out wrinkles, shadows, and other blemishes.

Great image quality: Although the scan quality is partly dependent on the quality of your phone’s camera, it also has a lot to do with the app itself.

We looked for apps with intuitive controls, a thoughtful layout, and helpful features such as automatic document recognition and capture.

Ease of use: Above all else, scanning apps need to be easy to use, or else you won’t want anything to do with them.

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