Select and copy text from any image on de-googled Android (GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, LineageOS, ...). Works like iOS Live Text or the text selection on Pixel phones, but fully local and without Google Play services.
How to use
Main workflow, from anything on your screen to copied text in seconds:
- Swipe down and tap the OCR screenshot tile
- Tap or drag over the text, then copy
One-time setup: open quick settings, tap the edit (pencil) button and drag the OCR screenshot tile into your tiles. Then enable instant capture via the button on the app's home screen, so the tile can take the screenshot by itself (Android 12+, uses a screenshot-only accessibility service that reads no screen content). Without instant capture, take a screenshot first and the tile opens it.
Second workflow, for existing images:
Share any image from any app (gallery, browser, messenger) to TextGrab and the text is selectable. Opening image files with TextGrab from a file manager works too, as does picking an image from the app's home screen.
Screenshots
| Tap a word | Long-press and drag | Full text view |
|---|---|---|
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How it works
The app bundles Google's ML Kit on-device text recognizer, the same class of neural model that powers Pixel Live Text. The model is packaged inside the APK, so recognition:
- runs entirely on the device. The app has no internet permission.
- needs no Google Play services and works on GrapheneOS out of the box.
- is fast: typically well under a second per screenshot on real hardware.
Supported languages
All Latin-script languages, including:
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Albanian, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Icelandic, Irish, Maltese, Swahili, Tagalog, Vietnamese (partial, some diacritics may be missed) and more, plus digits and common punctuation.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Devanagari need separate ML Kit model packs (roughly 20 MB each). They are not included yet but are easy to add. Open an issue if you want one of them.
Building
./gradlew assembleRelease
Output: app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk.
To build a signed release, create a keystore and put its credentials in
keystore/keystore.properties (this directory is gitignored):
storeFile=keystore/your-release.jks storePassword=... keyAlias=... keyPassword=...
Without that file the release build is unsigned. Keep your keystore safe: updates must be signed with the same key.
Installing with Obtainium
Tap the Obtainium badge above on your phone (or add
https://github.com/notune/TextGrab as an app source in
Obtainium) to install TextGrab and
get updates straight from this repo's releases.
Verifying the APK
Release APKs are signed with this certificate (package + SHA-256, ready to paste into AppVerifier):
dev.noah.textgrab
AB:C4:BB:AE:C5:6F:D3:DB:AB:AC:C8:62:D0:B4:5D:29:3B:53:CC:40:BF:67:D7:25:3B:3E:1B:7D:2D:48:0C:31
On a computer you can check a downloaded APK with:
apksigner verify --print-certs TextGrab.apk
After the first install, Android itself rejects any update that is not signed with the same key.
Notes
minSdk 26(Android 8.0),targetSdk 36.- The APK is ~43 MB; ~30 MB of that is the bundled recognition model.
- Photo permission is only requested for the "latest screenshot" feature. Images opened via share or the picker need no permission at all.
License
The app source code is licensed under the MIT License.
The bundled ML Kit text recognition SDK and its model are proprietary Google software, used and redistributed under the ML Kit Terms of Service. They are pulled from Google's Maven repository at build time and are not part of this repository.