The best open-source Android OCR

Ente Photos now comes with text recognition on both iOS and Android. Open any photo with text, tap the new text icon, and the app will surface the words it sees. Everything happens on your device, so nothing about that receipt, passport or love letter ever leaves your control.

For more information on how to use it, please check our docs.

Bringing OCR to mobile

For iOS, we could lean on Apple's excellent Vision framework. It ships with the OS and all of the work stays local, hence private. Most importantly, it actually works well. Using such a mature system API meant the iOS implementation was very straightforward.

Android is where we needed to build something new. Until now, most open-source implementations were aging Tesseract ports with lackluster accuracy. Google's ML Kit was the only…