Offline OCR for Android. Search your photos by text, entirely on-device.
About this app
Glyfen is an offline-first OCR app for Android that lets you search your photo library by text content. All processing happens entirely on your device — no cloud uploads, no internet required.
Point Glyfen at your photo folders and it scans every image for text using PaddleOCR. Receipts, documents, screenshots, business cards, labels — if an image contains printed text, Glyfen extracts it and makes it searchable.
A note on speed: because all OCR runs on your device, scanning takes time — and you always start it yourself. Glyfen never scans automatically or on a schedule. How long a scan takes depends on how many images it covers and your phone's hardware, so a large library on an older phone can take a while. Once you start a scan it keeps running even while you use other apps, and it resumes automatically if it's interrupted. Added new photos? Just run a scan again to index them.
Once scanned, your photos become searchable. Type a word and Glyfen lists every image whose text contains it, with a preview of the recognized text. Full-text search is powered by SQLite FTS5 for fast results even across thousands of indexed images.
Key features:
- Offline OCR: All text recognition runs on-device using PaddleOCR. No network connection, ever. - Full-text search: Find any receipt, note, or screenshot by the words inside it, in seconds, powered by SQLite FTS5. - Latin-script first: Recognition and dictionary correction are tuned for English and Latin scripts. The underlying PP-OCRv5 model also recognizes Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, and more. - Batch scanning: You pick the folders and start the scan yourself; Glyfen then processes them on-device and keeps running while you use other apps. Speed scales with how many images you scan and your phone's hardware. - Private by design: No analytics SDKs, no ads, no accounts, no tracking. Nothing is ever sent automatically. Optional diagnostics and telemetry are off by default and only leave your device if you choose to share a bug report. - EXIF-aware: Correctly handles rotated camera photos. - Format support: JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIF/HEIC (Android 9+). - Local-only storage: OCR results stay in a private database on your device and are never uploaded. - Crash recovery: Scans resume from where they left off after interruption. - Open source: Built from source and fully auditable, published on F-Droid.
Glyfen is free software, built from source and published on F-Droid. No ads, no accounts, no tracking.
Permissions: None requested up-front. You pick which folders Glyfen can read using the system folder picker — Glyfen never sees anything outside the folders you grant. No camera, microphone, or location access requested.
Licensed under MIT, by talixodev.
What's New in v1.0
Imported from the F-Droid repository index.
- First public release.
- - On-device OCR scanning with PaddleOCR (Latin + CJK)
- - Full-text search across scanned photos (FTS5)
- - Batch scanning with crash recovery
- - EXIF-aware rotation handling
- - JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIF/HEIC support
Version history
Jul 14, 2026 · 81.8 MB · Android API 26–35 · code 1
Imported from the F-Droid repository index.
- First public release.
- - On-device OCR scanning with PaddleOCR (Latin + CJK)
- - Full-text search across scanned photos (FTS5)
- - Batch scanning with crash recovery
- - EXIF-aware rotation handling
- - JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIF/HEIC support
SHA-256 cf368ed5a1a4ba7cc726a653a266672639400a919ba577fa040412698533e46d
Will it run on your device?
78%
- Runs on a broad range of modern Android versions.
- ABI coverage is focused on newer 64-bit devices.
- Aligned with the latest Android target SDK expectations.
Installation Guide
Open Settings on your Android device
Go to Security → Unknown sources (or Install unknown apps)
Enable "Allow from this source" for your browser or file manager
Open the downloaded APK file from your Downloads folder
Tap "Install" and wait for installation to complete
Launch the app from your home screen
Make sure to re-enable Unknown Sources restrictions after installation for security.
How to install this safely
How to verify the file you downloaded
Before you install anything, confirm the file is the one described here. On a computer, run shasum -a 256 your-download.apk (macOS or Linux) or certutil -hashfile your-download.apk SHA256 (Windows), then compare the output character-for-character with the SHA-256 on this page. If a single character differs, the file is not the build we recorded — delete it.
What the signing certificate proves
Every Android app is signed with a private key that only its developer holds. The fingerprint on this page is a hash of the matching public certificate, and it proves continuity rather than identity: it tells you a build came from whoever signed the earlier ones. Android enforces this at install time — if a package claiming to be dev.glyfen.app is signed with a different key, the system will refuse to install it over your existing copy. A fingerprint that changes between releases is worth pausing on, because a repackaged app that has been modified by someone else cannot keep the original signature.
How to roll back to an earlier version
No earlier build is on record for Glyfen, so there is nothing to roll back to yet. When a second version is published, this section will explain how to move between them safely.
Why we list sources instead of hosting everything
The official store channel is almost always the right choice: it updates automatically and carries the publisher's own distribution guarantees. A direct APK is useful when a device has no store access, when a rollout has not reached your region, or when you need a specific version — and only when the publisher has authorized that copy. APKBrowse does not list pirated, cracked, or unauthorized rebuilds of Glyfen, and a listing is removed when the evidence for it stops holding up.
Get Glyfen
Every source we list for dev.glyfen.app is legality-reviewed. Pirated or cracked builds are never offered.
Other sources
F-Droid listing
officialF-Droid builds this app from source and signs it. This is its official listing, with older builds and full release notes.
Source code
verified publisherThe upstream repository this build is compiled from.
We check legality and signature continuity, but device behaviour still varies. Install at your own discretion.
App Information
Security Verification
We record provenance; we do not run malware scans. Verify the hash yourself before installing.
SHA-256 Hash
cf368ed5a1a4ba7cc726a653a266672639400a919ba577fa040412698533e46d
Signing certificate
f4a5b277f1f13265c8d7a67b8eb344522f9e818acd1662bf276ae71860891b66
Permissions Required
Previous Versions
No earlier build is on record — this is the first release we have listed.
The signing certificate fingerprint for this release is on record, so a build that does not match it did not come from this publisher.
Report a problem with this listing
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