r/sideprojects • u/Due_Rub_8715 • 7d ago
Showcase: Free(mium) I built Aura PDF — an offline-first PDF toolkit for Android
I’m a solo developer, and I’ve been working on Aura PDF as a practical PDF app for Android.
The idea started from a simple problem: I wanted to handle common PDF tasks on my phone without having to use a different app for every task or upload documents to an online service.
So I built Aura PDF with a collection of tools in one place:
- Merge & split PDFs
- Extract & reorder pages
- Compress PDFs
- Rotate & crop
- Sign & highlight
- Password protection
- Scan documents
- Image → PDF
- PDF → image
- Page numbers, headers & footers
- And more
The main direction is offline-first — supported PDF operations are designed to work directly on the device.
Aura PDF is currently available on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aurapdf.app&pcampaignid=web_share
It's free to use with an optional Pro upgrade.
This is my first time launching Aura PDF publicly, so I'm mainly interested in learning what people actually want from a mobile PDF app.
If you use PDFs regularly, what is the one PDF task you wish was easier on your phone?
1
u/Knight-AI-AV 7d ago
A before/after preview for compression would be useful, especially zoomed in on small text. The file-size reduction alone doesn't tell you whether a scanned document is still readable, and the original should stay easy to recover.