Gander: PDF & Document Reader

Arjun Maniyani

About this app

One small app that opens practically any file, entirely on your phone.

Gander is an offline document viewer for Android. Open a PDF, a Word document, a spreadsheet or a photo and it renders straight away, on the device, with no account, no sign-up and no cloud round trip.

Every format you are likely to be sent

• PDF documents, rendered page by page, pinch to zoom

• Word documents (.docx, and Word 97-2003 .doc)

• OpenDocument text (.odt) and Rich Text (.rtf)

• Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .xlsb, .csv, .ods), with tabs for multi-sheet workbooks

• PowerPoint slides (.pptx)

• EPUB books (.epub) without DRM

• Photos: JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, BMP, GIF, SVG, AVIF and more

• Video: MP4, MKV, WebM, MOV and more

• Audio: MP3, M4A, FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus

• Markdown, plain text, and source code

• Zip archives (.zip)

• 3D models (.stl)

Private by construction, and you can check it

Gander requests no permissions at all. It does not hold the INTERNET permission, so it is structurally unable to send your documents anywhere. There are no ads, no trackers, no analytics and no accounts.

You do not have to take my word for any of that. Open App permissions on this page and there is nothing listed. Read the Data safety section. Or read the code. Gander is open source under the MIT licence, and all of it is at https://github.com/mokshablr/gander

How files reach it

Gander opens the file you hand it, through the system file picker, through "Open with" from your file manager or another app, or from a folder you grant it once. It does not scan or browse your whole phone, and it never asks for storage permission. That is the privacy design rather than a missing feature. Recent files come back with thumbnail previews, and folders you have granted stay one tap away.

Built for reading on a phone

• Find in document: search inside PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, text and code, with match navigation

• Select and copy text in a PDF, and read one with a screen reader

• Open password protected PDFs by entering the password

• Night mode for PDFs and Word documents: paper goes black and text goes white, colours keep their hue, and photographs are left exactly as they were printed

• Deep zoom into large photos with tiled decoding, and correct rotation read from EXIF

• Share the open file onward, save a copy of it, or jump to the folder it sits in

• Material 3 design, dark mode, edge to edge

Small, and one download for every phone

About 5 MB, a single build that runs on every processor with no native libraries at all, on Android 8.0 and newer.

Honest about what it is not

• Gander is a viewer, not an editor

• Legacy binary .ppt is not supported. Binary .xls and .doc are

• Complex PowerPoint decks render approximately, and spreadsheet charts are not drawn

• Viewing PDFs in full needs Android System WebView 125 or newer. With an older one, on Android 9 and later, Gander can show the pages as pictures, without search or text selection

If you want an offline PDF and document viewer that simply shows your files and keeps its hands off everything else, that is Gander.

Open source, MIT licensed: https://github.com/mokshablr/gander

Issues and feature requests: https://github.com/mokshablr/gander/issues

Ratings and reviews

Woah, this app is truly incredible! Though I think that it'd be nice for there to be a dark mode setting (black background with white text) and an option to have the text fit to the screen so you don't have to zoom in, but these aren't super important since I'm mainly suggesting them 'cause of another app having them as pretty handy features for easily reading stories.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the best free and lightweight document apps I have found for Android. Gander-2.2 is small, fast, simple, and very easy to use. It opens Word documents and PDF files without taking up a lot of storage space. For me, Gander-2.2 works especially well as part of a mobile document workflow together with Email and FairScan. This combination is a real “mobile office” for working with documents and data when you are away from a computer. It does exactly what I need !!!

this app is literally one of one. there simply isn't an app that, opens a whole range of documents including MSOffice and OpenOffice, also deal with video and audio and view zip 'cause why not? universally compatible, open-source, and lightweight. thnx dev. PS. been using this app for quite a while now, congrats on getting it into play store.

What’s new

Word files saved by WPS Office, LibreOffice or Google Docs now open as pages, with the page readout and Go to page, where Gander showed one long sheet. A Word file with a footer prints one sheet per page, not two. Tabs in a Word file reach their stops, footnotes are numbered through the document, and a file not set for different odd and even pages shows one header and footer on every page. A Graphviz graph saved as .dot or .gv opens as text.