Gander

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