DocWala Privacy Policy
Applies to the Android app DocWala
(package com.docwala.scanner).
Effective date: 17 September 2026.
Last updated: 17 September 2026.
DocWala scans documents to PDF on your phone. This page explains, in plain language, what happens to your documents and what information leaves your device. It is written to be read, not to cover us.
The short version.
- Your scans stay on your phone. We never upload them and we cannot see them.
- There is no account, no signup, no analytics and no crash reporting.
- We run no server of our own, so nothing you do in the app is sent to us.
- The app shows ads. Google, who serves them, does receive some information from your device — your IP address, how you interact with the ad, and basic diagnostic data. That section is below and it is not buried.
Your documents
Everything you scan or import is stored in the app's own private folder on your phone. Android keeps that folder inaccessible to other apps. Your documents are not sent to us or to anyone else, and there is no server in this product that could receive them.
Detecting the edges of a page, straightening it, and building the PDF all happen on the device. So does reading the text off a page — in English, Hindi and Marathi through Android's own on-device text recognition, and in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia and Punjabi through a language pack stored on your phone. No page image and no recognised text is ever transmitted anywhere.
When you share, print or export a document, you choose where it goes and the document is handed to the app you picked. What happens next is governed by that app's privacy policy, not ours.
PDFs you protect with a password
If you password-protect a PDF, or open one that is already protected, you type the password each time it is needed. It is used for that one operation and then discarded. We do not store it anywhere — not on the device, not anywhere else — which also means we cannot recover it for you if you forget it. Keep it somewhere safe.
No account, and no analytics
The app has no sign-in. We never ask for your name, email address, phone number or date of birth, and there is nothing to create or delete. We do not use any analytics product, and we do not collect crash reports. Nothing in the app measures what you tap or how often you use it.
Advertising
The app is free and is paid for by a single advertisement shown in your document library. The ads are served by Google AdMob. We do not run an ad network ourselves and we receive nothing from it.
To serve, measure and protect those ads against fraud, Google's advertising software collects the following from your device. This is required for the ads to work at all and we cannot switch it off while ads are shown:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your device's IP address | Delivering the ad, and estimating your general location (country or region level) for it |
| How you interact with the ad | Measuring and billing the advertisement, and limiting how often you see the same one |
| Diagnostic information about the app and the ad software | Making the advertising work correctly and detecting faults |
| Device and account identifiers used by Google's advertising systems | Preventing fraudulent and automated ad traffic |
Two things we have deliberately done to limit this:
- We removed the Android advertising ID from the app. The advertising software would normally read a resettable identifier that can follow you between apps to build a profile. We stripped that permission, and the related Android advertising permissions with it, so it is not available to the app at all.
- Every ad request we make asks for non-personalised ads. That means ads are chosen from general context rather than from a profile of your interests or your behaviour in other apps.
These reduce what is collected. They do not reduce it to nothing, and we are not going to claim otherwise. Google's own handling of this data is covered by the Google Privacy Policy and its advertising privacy information.
If you would rather not see ads at all, the app offers a one-time purchase that removes them. When ads are off, no ad is requested and nothing above is collected. See Payments below.
Downloading a language pack
Text recognition in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia and Punjabi requires a language file that is too large to include in the app. The app downloads it only when you choose that language, and it tells you the size first.
These files are hosted on GitHub (the tessdata_fast
repository of the open-source Tesseract project), and are delivered through
GitHub's content delivery network. Like any download, the request tells GitHub
your device's IP address and the identifier your device's networking software
sends with the request.
The request asks for a fixed, public file by name. It contains nothing about you, nothing about your documents, and no identifier we created. GitHub's handling of that request is covered by the GitHub Privacy Statement. If you never choose one of those eight languages, this download never happens.
Payments
The only thing the app sells is the removal of advertising. It is a single one-time purchase, not a subscription, and it is handled entirely by Google Play.
We never see or receive your card details, UPI details, bank information or billing address. Google Play tells the app only whether the purchase exists for the Google account signed in on the device, and the app stores that one yes-or-no answer locally so ads stay off when you are offline. Google Play's handling of the transaction is covered by the Google Privacy Policy.
Removing ads does not unlock anything. Scanning, saving, sharing, printing, all the PDF tools, and text recognition in every supported language including all eight downloadable packs are free for everyone whether you pay or not.
Backups
Automatic backup of your documents to your Google account is switched off. This app holds PDFs you may have received from your bank and documents you have chosen to protect with a password, and uploading those to a cloud backup by default is not a decision we were willing to make for you.
Direct device-to-device transfer is allowed. When you set up a new phone and copy your apps and data across from your old one, your scan library comes with you. That transfer is between your two devices, with no third party in between. It is enabled because there is no cloud copy, so without it a new phone would mean losing everything you had scanned.
Because there is no cloud copy, a lost, stolen or broken phone means the scans on it are gone. If your documents matter, export them somewhere yourself.
Permissions the app asks for
- Internet access — used for exactly two things: requesting the ad, and downloading a language pack when you choose one.
- Network state — used to tell whether a connection exists before attempting either of those.
- Billing — used to offer the one-time purchase through Google Play.
The app does not ask for camera, storage, photos, contacts, location, microphone, or phone permissions. When you scan, the photograph is taken by Android's own document scanner or by your phone's camera app, which hands the app only the finished page.
Children
DocWala is a general-purpose document tool. It is not directed at children, it has no content aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone, of any age.
Your choices
- Delete a document — deleting it in the app removes the file from your phone, along with any text that was read from it.
- Remove everything — uninstalling the app deletes its private folder and everything in it. There is no copy elsewhere for us to delete, because there was never a copy elsewhere.
- Turn off ads — the one-time purchase described above stops all ad requests, and with them everything in the Advertising section.
- Skip the language download — English, Hindi and Marathi need no download at all.
Changes to this policy
If what the app collects changes, this page changes with it and the "last updated" date at the top moves. We will not quietly broaden what is collected and leave this page describing the old behaviour.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything above, can go to ashishpandit58292@gmail.com.
This page is the privacy policy for the DocWala Android app and covers nothing else.