Ream

Why this exists

Every scanner app on the App Store wants a weekly subscription. The free tiers stamp watermarks on your documents, play full screen video ads between scans, or charge you to combine two pages into one PDF, which is the entire job. Ream is the version of that app with the meter taken out.

Free means free

Scanning, text recognition, multi page documents, search, labels, fill and sign, import and export are all free, with no limits and no trial. There is no paid tier that unlocks a feature. Ream costs nothing to run because it runs entirely on your phone, so there is nothing to recover from you.

Searchable, not just a picture

Every scan is read on device and the recognised text is written into the PDF as an invisible layer sitting exactly over the words on the page. The file looks like a photo of your document and behaves like a text document. You can select and copy from it, search it inside Ream, and search it in Preview, Files, Adobe Acrobat or anything else you open it in later.

Search results show you the matching line with your term highlighted, so a document that turns up under a word that is not in its title explains itself.

Fill and sign

Type into a scanned form, sign it with your finger, or draw on it freehand, then send it back. Filled text is written as real text rather than a picture of text, so a completed form stays searchable. Markups stay editable after you save, because Ream keeps the untouched original alongside the finished file and rebuilds from it every time you make a change.

Nothing leaves your phone

Ream makes no network requests. Not for text recognition, not for storage, not for analytics. There is no account to create, no server holding your documents, and no way for us to see them. Your scans sit in the app's own folder, which is visible in Files, so you can get them out without Ream's cooperation.

Built to give your documents back

Export writes a plain ZIP of your PDFs rather than a proprietary backup format, because a backup you can only open with the app that made it is not really a backup. Import runs any PDF you are sent back through the same pipeline, so a restored document is identical to a freshly scanned one. Ream also appears in the iOS share sheet, so a PDF attached to an email can go straight in.

Your library survives things going wrong

Scans are the artifacts, not database rows, so they live on disk as ordinary files. If the app's index is ever damaged, Ream sets it aside rather than deleting it, then rebuilds your library from the PDFs themselves and tells you it did. Titles, labels and recognised text are restored from a manifest that travels inside your export.

One optional tip, for finishes

If you want to chip in, three one time purchases unlock four extra accent finishes: Graphite, Manila, Red Pen and Chalkboard. All three unlock exactly the same thing and differ only in amount. They are not subscriptions, and they do not unlock a single scanning, recognition, PDF or export feature, because those are the product and they are free.

Ream is made by one person in Indiana. It requires iPhone running iOS 26 or later.