Android has no fax, but it has two ways to make a PDF

Android has had a system print framework since 4.4, and every device that ships with Google’s services has a Save as PDF destination in it. It is the most useful and least known thing on the phone for this task, because it works from inside applications that have no export button.

From almost anything — a Gmail message, a page in Chrome, a receipt in a banking app, a Google Doc — open the overflow menu, choose Share or Print, then Print, then set the destination to Save as PDF and tap the download icon. The file lands in Downloads and is a normal PDF.

That single step is what turns “I need to fax this thing on my phone” into a problem with a file in it.

Google Drive has a document scanner built in — open Drive, tap the +, choose Scan, and photograph the page. It crops to the edges, corrects the angle and saves a PDF rather than a photograph. On recent Pixel devices the same scanner is in the Camera app under Modes, and Samsung phones have an equivalent in My Files.

Use it in preference to the camera whenever the source is paper. A scan arrives already flattened and straightened, which matters because a fax page has no gray in it and a shadow across a photograph can come out as a solid black band with the text inside it gone — why a photograph arrives as a black band explains the mechanism, and it is the same on any phone. Either way the preview shows you what you have before you pay.

Android saves JPEG by default. Samsung and Pixel devices can be set to HEIF instead, under the camera’s advanced picture-format setting, and that works here as well — as do PNG screenshots. PDF, JPG, PNG and HEIC are all read directly, which means nothing on this page requires you to convert a file before uploading it.

Up to 30 pages go as one transmission for one price, in whatever order you add them. A scanned form and two screenshots is one fax.

It is worth being clear about what the Play Store fax listings are. None of them dial anything from the phone — Android has no telephony path for fax and exposes no API for one, so every one of them uploads your document to a carrier over the internet, which is what a web page doing this also does. The difference between the options is the business model, not the technology, and most are sold as a monthly plan with a page allowance attached.

What Android does give you, and what makes an app unnecessary here, is the print framework at the top of this page. It is a system service reachable from inside almost every application on the phone, which means the file half of this task is already solved by the operating system. Pair it with a sender that charges once and there is nothing left to install — see sending a fax without a subscription.

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