Google shutters another Area 120 project: Stack PDF scanner

Summary

• Google axed its experimental document scanner app Stack, pushing users to utilize Google Drive’s similar capabilities instead.
• Stack’s conveniences, such as auto edge detection and categorization, can be found on Google Drive’s document scanner.
• Google Drive now offers a seamless transition for Stack users, with a new FAB option and camera prompts for document scanning.

Google is constantly innovating and creating new services to simplify life for Android users and Workspace subscribers. More often than not, the result is a bunch of services with overlapping features, which must eventually share cohesive branding or be killed off altogether. Several such services were on the chopping block in 2023, and we are just halfway through 2024, and Google has already pulled the plug on an experimental social media service and the well-known Google One VPN. Now, a document scanner bites the dust.

One of the benefits of being a multi-billion dollar tech business comes in the form of a wing dedicated to incubating experimental projects before they are culled or eventually spun off into independent business entities. Google’s incubator is called Area 120, and is responsible for harboring several success stories, like Gmail, Google News, and Waymo. A neat little document scanner app called ‘Stack: PDF Scanner’ was one such project.

Stack offered several conveniences, such as automatic edge detection and document capture, minimizing your involvement, and convenient automated document categorization too. However, 9to5Google reports the project has been taken off life support, and will be gone for good on September 23 this year. The app listing on the Play Store has disappeared as well.

Stack lives on in Google Drive’s document scanner

How to export your documents from Stack to Drive

If you knew of the Stack app and used it, Google now has support documentation explaining how you can export all the scanned documents in Stack to Google Drive. In case you used the app earlier but don’t have it anymore or didn’t receive the email Google sent about the shutdown, downloading the latest version from APKMirror might still help recover your files. However, the app’s ending doesn’t mean we lose functionality. The Drive document scanner already incorporates the automatic edge detection and scanning capabilities we mentioned earlier.

While the convenience of smart categorization is lost, Google Drive now has a dedicated Floating Action Button (FAB) to launch the scanner UI. Moreover, the Pixel Camera app (formerly known as Google Camera) also displays on-screen prompts redirecting you to the Drive document scanner when a document is detected in the frame. The utility even uses machine learning to suggest a relevant file name.

While Drive is a fitting replacement, it is still unfortunate to see another Google app die.