Comparison

ReaderView vs Private Scan

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

ReaderView

Transform cluttered web pages and documents into a clean, distraction-free reading experience. Save articles, videos, and more for offline access, with features like highlighting, note-taking, and full-text search.

Highlights
  • Distraction-free reading mode
  • Save content for offline access
  • Highlight passages and add notes
  • Full-text search across saved articles
  • Organize content with folders
  • Sync across devices with iCloud
Features
Read full description

Web pages, documents, podcasts, and videos can be difficult to save, read, and search later. ReaderView transforms them into clean, distraction-free articles so you can focus on what matters. Save content for later, read offline, highlight important passages, and quickly find them again. ReaderView works with: - Web articles and blog posts - PDF documents, including images, tables, and mathematical formulas - Word documents and text files - Apple Podcasts and Spotify podcast episodes - YouTube videos - Vimeo and Dailymotion videos - X/Twitter posts, long-form articles, and videos TRANSCRIPTS THAT FEEL LIKE ARTICLES ReaderView looks for publisher-provided captions before generating a transcript, giving you faster and more accurate results whenever captions are available. With media transcripts, you can: - Read while listening or watching - Tap a word or timestamp to jump to that moment - Follow synchronized highlighting and automatic scrolling - Summarize any article with on-device Apple Intelligence (supported devices only) - Navigate with source-provided or automatically generated chapters - Play, pause, seek, and adjust playback speed - Show or hide videos for a distraction-free reading experience - Keep videos visible while scrolling when shown - Cancel queued transcriptions - Download source media when available READ, ORGANIZE, AND FIND EVERYTHING - Open a clean Reader View with a single tap - Listen with high-quality voices that work offline - Save articles and images for offline reading - Highlight passages and add notes - Search across your entire library - Find text within individual articles - Organize articles into folders - Sync across devices with iCloud - Find saved articles using Spotlight - Read comfortably with Dark Mode and Auto-Scroll - Support for Asian and right-to-left languages, including Arabic and Hebrew COPY, SHARE, AND EXPORT Export articles as plain text, Markdown, HTML, WebVTT, or PDF. You can also copy or share the original link. WebVTT is available for timestamped media transcripts. Share content with ReaderView from Safari, Apple News, X/Twitter, Feedly, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Word, and many other apps. When captions are unavailable, automatic on-device transcription for podcasts and X/Twitter videos requires iOS 26 or later. Have feedback or ideas? Contact laurent@appblit.com. If ReaderView helps you, an App Store review would mean a lot.

About

Private Scan

Features
Read full description

Scan anything into a clean, searchable PDF without an account, a subscription, or your documents leaving your device. Everything runs on your iPhone and iPad: edge detection, filters, text recognition, even smart naming. Your documents go only where you send them, and the only report the app makes is an anonymous usage and crash report with nothing from them in it, which you can turn off in Settings. THE PRIVATE ONE PrivateScan never sends your documents to a server for processing. Scanning, filters, text recognition, and even smart naming all run on your device, using Apple frameworks and an optional downloadable model. The app keeps your documents, their names, and their text on your device unless you send them. It does send anonymous usage and crash reports so we can fix crashes and improve it; they never include your documents, their names, their text or their images, and you can turn them off in Settings > Privacy. SCAN ANYTHING Point the camera at a page and PrivateScan finds the edges, straightens the result, and cleans it up. Scan books as open spreads and split them into facing pages, capture whiteboards without glare, compose ID cards and passports onto a single page for free, and import photos or PDFs. Keep everything organized in folders with color labels. SIGN AND EDIT Draw a signature once and place it on any page. Reorder, split, and combine documents. Rescue bad lighting with enhance, black & white, grayscale, and whiteboard filters. FIND ANY DOCUMENT Search is free for everyone and reads every scanned word, so a receipt, a contract, or a letter is one search away, even offline. Premium unlocks the extracted text itself: view it, copy it, export it, and embed it in your PDFs so they are searchable in any reader. Premium also adds smart naming, which titles each scan for you, so receipts stop being called "Scan 47". On an iPhone or iPad with enough memory, a small model that runs on your device names receipts and invoices once its 1.8 GB download is in place. Apple's text recognition names every other scan, and every scan on other devices. Translate extracted text without it leaving your device. EXPORT ANY WAY YOU WORK PDF, JPG, PNG, Word, Excel, TXT, and RTF, with file size presets, your own watermark, and password protected PDFs. Word and Excel exports build real .docx and .xlsx files entirely on your device, so even your editable documents never touch a server. Excel export finds the tables in a scan and turns them into rows and columns you can edit. Excel export requires iOS 26. LOCK IT DOWN Turn on the app lock and PrivateScan asks for Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode when it opens. Files are protected with iOS data protection so they stay encrypted while your device is locked. A privacy shield hides your documents in the app switcher. YOUR DEVICES, YOUR CLOUD iCloud sync is off by default. Turn it on and your documents sync through your own private iCloud, protected by your Apple Account. We run no servers and could not read your documents if we wanted to. ONE PRICE, FOREVER Scanning is free. A single purchase unlocks premium: text extraction, smart naming, Word and Excel export, password protected PDFs, exports without watermarks, and no limits on pages or exports. No subscription. Buy it once, own it forever, share it with your family through Family Sharing. Your documents stay on your device. The privacy policy says exactly what the anonymous reports carry and how to turn them off: https://freedom-terminal.com/privatescan/privacy/

Screenshots

ReaderView4 screens
Private Scan4 screens

Verdict

The call

ReaderView and Private Scan are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters — price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. ReaderView sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Private Scan sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

ReaderView ships an update every 2 days, Private Scan every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on November 1, 2026 and November 10, 2026 respectively.

ScorecardNo meaningful differences
ReaderView versus Private Scan: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterReaderViewPrivate Scan
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.6 (67 ratings) — better—
Positive reviews88.6% of reviews—
Number of ratings67 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 2 days — betterEvery 3 days
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFree with in-app purchases—
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, Mac — better
Requires iOS16.0 — better17.0
Further details — not scored
Size20 MB41 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperAppBlit LLCVishut Dhar

Bugs and requests

ReaderView

Reported bugs

10 issues
  • Unable to read PDFs from web
  • Images get blurred in saved files
  • Error message: "No Content Yet"
  • App not working on iPhone 13 Pro
  • Lost all folders and files
Show 5 more
  • Forces sharing its own link
  • Disabled copy-paste
  • Comments not appearing in reader view
  • Formatting issues: gaps between lines
  • App not working with Apple's News app (iOS 10)

Requested features

18 requests
  • Support for Simplified Chinese
  • Folders displayed on home page
  • In-App Purchase for macOS version
  • Swipe to go back/exit function
  • Dark mode in reading mode
Show 13 more
  • More color options, tags, and note management tools
  • Sync with Instapaper
  • Add comments along with annotations
  • Import Instapaper articles with highlights
  • Filter highlights by color
  • Text search function
  • Return to page location after exiting reader
  • Sync saved stories across devices
  • Sync with Evernote and Dropbox with tags
  • Copy all text function
  • Copy text feature for text-to-speech
  • Sync with Evernote
  • Change default colors

Private Scan

Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.

In-app purchases

1 purchases

ReaderView

One-time1
  • ReaderView PRO$4.99
1 purchases

Private Scan

One-time1
  • PrivateScan Premium$9.99

Questions

Is ReaderView free?
ReaderView is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Private Scan free?
Private Scan is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do ReaderView or Private Scan have ads?
Neither ReaderView nor Private Scan shows ads.
Which is updated more often, ReaderView or Private Scan?
ReaderView ships an update every 2 days, and Private Scan every 3 days. Most recently, ReaderView was updated on November 1, 2026 and Private Scan on November 10, 2026.

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