Universal Scanner - PDF Scans, an iPhone app that turns paper documents, ID cards and other cards into scans and PDFs, shows a price of Free on the US App Store. The Hong Kong site New Mobile Life reported on November 7, 2026 that its usual price is US $0.99. One caution first: the developer’s own description says the US storefront was free until October 21, 2026, 8 PM PDT, and paid afterward, yet the listing still showed Free when we checked, so confirm the price before you tap Get.

What does Universal Scanner do?

The app, made by Himhuu Co., Ltd., starts from the camera, and you do not choose a document type first. Capture, text recognition and image processing all happen on the iPhone, and the developer says scanning and text recognition do not require uploading content to Himhuu.

The listing breaks the workflow into three parts:

  • Capture: live hints about lighting, edges and movement. When a document is centered, steady and small in the frame, automatic zoom can move in up to about 2x while leaving space around the page. You can turn it off or zoom yourself, and the developer warns that digital zoom adds no detail, so moving closer is better.
  • Crop and straighten: the app looks for the document edges, leaves a safety margin, corrects flat page perspective and adds a white border. You can drag the four corners, inspect the preview or keep the full image. If it cannot find a reliable edge, the full photo stays intact, and the original is always kept.
  • Organize and export: on-device recognition helps tell paper documents, ID cards, household registers and other cards apart, and you can correct the type. You can add pages, reorder and rotate them, pick Auto, Natural, Clear or Black & White, search scans by name and export JPEG images or image-based, multipage PDFs.

What else is included?

You can save to Photos straight from the image viewer, or save every page at once. A custom note can be added to a page as a repeating diagonal watermark to state its intended use. Notes show up in saved images and exported PDFs, can be edited or removed, and leave the original untouched. The developer is careful to say a note does not guarantee tamper protection or legal enforceability.

The listing says there is no account, advertising, subscription or in-app purchase. Its privacy label says the developer does not collect any data from the app, which Apple notes is a developer statement that Apple has not verified. The developer’s own site adds that the app currently has no analytics or tracking SDK and that Himhuu does not receive your scans or recognized text.

What are the limits?

The developer lists them openly, which helps you decide before downloading:

  • Detection, cropping and quality checks are not always accurate, so review every page before use.
  • There is no editable text output, no Word or DOCX export, no cloud sync and no flattening of curved book pages.
  • PDFs fit pages onto A4 paper, and ID cards are not printed at guaranteed actual size.

So this is a scanner for turning paper into images and image-based PDFs, not an OCR tool that gives you text you can edit.

How do you get it?

  1. Open the App Store on an iPhone and search for Universal Scanner - PDF Scans by Himhuu Co., Ltd., or use the official listing. The app is listed for iPhone only.
  2. Check that the button says Get rather than showing a price. The US storefront showed Free when we looked. The developer notes that other regions apply local dates and prices, so a different storefront may charge.
  3. Tap Get. The listing says the app needs iOS 17.0 or later and takes up 3.6 MB. It supports English and Simplified Chinese and is rated 4+ in the Productivity category.
  4. Open the app, point the camera at a page and let it guide you through capture, crop and export.

The listing also shows compatibility with Macs that have an Apple M1 chip or later, running macOS 14.0 or later, and with Apple Vision running visionOS 1.0 or later. Version 1.2, listed on September 29, added the automatic zoom guide and the page watermark note. The listing says it has not received enough ratings to show an overview.

Who should download it?

Anyone who regularly photographs paper documents, receipts or cards and wants a private, no-account scanner without a subscription will find it a light download at 3.6 MB. People who need editable text or Word files should look elsewhere, since the developer says those are not supported. If you plan to share scans of ID cards, review each page first, as the developer itself advises.

Because the developer’s description states a paid price after October 21, 2026, the free period could end without notice, and no new end date appears in either source.

Next step: open the Universal Scanner - PDF Scans listing on the App Store and confirm the price reads Free before you tap Get.