Your phone knows the filenames. Phondex knows what's inside them. It reads the text inside your photos, screenshots, PDFs, Word and Excel files and makes all of it searchable — Arabic included. One search box across everything, with the matching line shown right in the result. Then open, share or delete the file from there. Everything runs on the device. No account, no upload, no server — it works in airplane mode. Free.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
I built Phondex because of a problem I kept hitting on my own phone.
Everything important in my life arrives as a file. Invoices as PDFs. Contracts as Word documents. IDs and receipts as photos. A price list someone screenshots and sends on WhatsApp. Six months later I need one of them and I have no idea what it was called — IMG-20260419-WA0031.jpg tells me nothing.
So I'd try the tools I already had:
• Google Photos finds text inside pictures, and it's good at it. But only pictures, and only the ones it has uploaded.
• Files by Google and every file manager I tried search filenames only. If the word I remember is inside the PDF, it doesn't exist as far as they're concerned.
• Cloud search means uploading my ID photos and contracts to someone else's server. For personal documents, that was a no.
Nothing connected the two halves. I wanted one search box that looks inside pictures and inside documents, on my phone, without sending anything anywhere.
That's Phondex.
What it does
• Reads the text inside photos and screenshots on-device, and extracts text from PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text files.
• One search box across all of it — filename or content — with the matching line shown right in the result.
• Arabic works. This was the hard part and the reason the app exists in this shape: a fast recognizer handles Latin scripts, and anything Arabic or low-confidence is passed to a second, heavier engine that actually reads Arabic. Mixed Arabic/English documents are handled as one file, not two problems.
• Filter by date, type or folder. Open, share or delete straight from the results.
What it doesn't do
• No account. No sign-up. No upload. There is no backend — I don't have a copy of anything you index.
• It works with the network off. One of the screenshots above is airplane mode, finding a word printed inside a photo someone sent me in 2023.
The honest trade-offs
• The first index of a big library takes a while, and it's deliberately polite about it: the heavy Arabic engine only runs while your phone is charging, because an early version drained a test phone from 100% to 0% overnight and I never wanted that to happen to a user.
• The download is large (~110 MB) because the recognition models ship inside the app. That's the price of not using a server.
• Android 8.0+ only. No iOS — the on-device pieces this depends on don't map cleanly there.
It's free, and I'm the only person working on it.
I'd genuinely like to know: what would you type into that search box first? And if you have documents in a language I haven't tested properly, tell me which — that's the most useful feedback I can get today.
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