Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

This happened to me with countless ios apps.

Just the same, I will count some of them:

- I used an app (gas cubby) to keep track of my car mileage. You could enter your vehicles. When you filled up, you would select a vehicle and enter mileage and gallons and cost, and it would keep track of everything. You could export the data. You could also enter lots of other things, like VIN, insurance, service intervals, etc.

It was a decent app and offline.

And one update - everything changed. It made everything cloud based, uploaded all your very private information and added a login. jerks.

- I used an app (camscanner+) that would let you take a picture of a document, it would find the edges and turn it into a .pdf file. This was sold to tencent, which had no privacy policy (broken link) and uploaded all your data to the cloud. When the privacy policy link eventually worked it was in super ambiguous broken english and basically said they use all your personal information.

- I used an app called adblock ios that created a VPN at 127.0.0.1 and allowed you to filter your phone traffic. Apple made them change (cripple) it. Happily I read the 1-star reviews and didn't update.

I think I'm a pretty astute user, the general population just has to get used to being worked over in this fashion.

Apple is 100% in the wrong here. You should:

- be able to know what your phone is doing, what sites apps are contacting

- be able to firewall your phone - even to apple

- know of changes - especially change of policies/behavior/ownership before installing an app

- be able to revert apps

I think the GPL is becoming more and more important as this stuff has taken root.

FWIW, iOS has the “scan documents” feature built-in. You can trigger it from Notes, and then save the resulting PDF wherever you want.

You can also trigger it from Files

You can also trigger it from macOS!

With a bit of organisation, adequate lighting, and a photo tripod, this is quicker than using my flatbed scanner.

> be able to firewall your phone - even to apple

But you can. 1Blocker firewall everything for you, albeit it requires you to add an SSL certificate to trust.

Is there a business opportunity here?

1. Find a handful of decent apps you use and like

2. Copy the apps functionality and user interface

3. Wait for the inevitable update that breakes your use-case

4. Launch

Try scannable for iOS pdf scanning. Evernote hasn’t screwed it up yet.

I'm sure they will, given how bad they screwed up their main app. "Hey let's force all our users to move to a slower version with less features, built on Electron, it'll be great!"

iOS has a good document scanner built into the files app that creates PDFs. You need to long press and select scan document.

Yeah I was happy when they added scanning to the notes app, which I believe was the first time apple added scanning (the time period was before files).

When I tried out this feature recently, the image resolution in the exported PDFs was abysmal (though it looked fine in the Notes app).

I don't know for the other commenters, my main use of a document scanner is to backup in PDF form on my NAS and in Google Drive so I can trash the physical copy.

The scanning part is only the beginning, the phone -> network pipeline needs to be automatic and reliable, and Apple will do nothing for third party synching.

Perhaps a Shortcut pipeline could do it ? If it still gave enough flexibility about batch scanning etc. ?

It’s possible to include your NAS and Google Drive in the files app which should give you what you want.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-files-ap...

I use iCloud to do exactly what you say and trash the physical copies, but it should be possible with anything in the files app AFAIK.

Thanks, but those are just hooks in the app (and stuff like DSFile disconnect every here and there)

You still need to manually save each document where you want it, instead of the app doing it automically in batch at every scan. With dedicated scan apps I never need to think about it, just scan and I know it's been done.

Earlier this month I got tired fumbling through all the little steps to use notes app for scanning and then separating out the PDF so I blogged[0] up the steps (including screencaps).

[0] https://wittman.org/blog/scan-paper-document-to-pdf-with-iph...

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