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Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft used to have an app called Office Lens. It helped color correct and keystone adjust documents scanned with a phone camera. They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive. After installing OneDrive and dodging multiple dark pattern storage upsells, I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools. I’m sure someone got a bonus for increasing OneDrive installs though.

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I got caught up in that too. Install OneDrive and saw you can't use it without signing up. I bailed right that.

Now admittedly my workaround ended up being uh... Google Drive.

I've since replaced Office Lens with FairScan. Usually it's the case that the big tech proprietary software is extremely streamlined while the open-source alternative is janky and confusing, but in this case it seems Microsoft's greed has flipped this completely upside down

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fairscan.app/

> I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools.

Loved office lens! The closets thing they have now is - + icon and Document.

It doesn’t? I use the OneDrive app for scanning documents all the time. + button then “Capture”

Oh, I have to use their app to take the pic. I can’t use my existing photos anymore.

It's worse than that - the feature exists in the paid OneDrive app, it lets you scan, edit, add pages etc just like the office lens. It just doesn't save the output - scanned files just disappear in the void.

What do you meant?

A quick search on youtube give me many short showing this function in OneDrive app.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YT9EmGCpRxk

Wow. This is news to me. Office Lens had been my trusted scanning app for ten years. It was years ahead of Cam Scanner bullshit, which many people used, likely because of marketing.

What the fuck. I dodged a bullet by deciding to try a FOSS scanning app at F-Droid's suggestion (whose timing may not have been accidental). The trapeze correction of FairScan is not great... but it's not going to try to pull any crap on me, and if the app changes, it's probably for the better.

Unregulated capitalism descents into scams and fraud. Why better your products and services when it is possible to buy competitors, increase prices and lie?

We need judges and policymakers that punish harshly this behavior and force companies to compete in quality and price instead of lies and competition elimination.

The "OneDrive" app definitely has a nice document scanning tool.

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