Gander 1.7

Mostly things people asked for after the Show HN.

PDF zoom now goes to 10x instead of 3x. The old limit was a library default I had never overridden, and it was not enough to read something small on a full page, like a QR code on a ticket. (#2, thanks @neuos)

OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods) now show up in Open-with. They already rendered fine, but the MIME type was never registered, so tapping an .ods in a file manager did not offer Gander. Opening one from inside the app always worked. (thanks to sgc on Hacker News)

Screen reader support. Someone asked how Gander handles accessibility, I went and checked, and the answer was "not well". Now the back button, the photo viewer, web-rendered images and the file rows on the home screen are all labelled, and the search match count is announced as "Match 2 of 7" rather than "two sevenths". (thanks @FreedomBen for asking)

Still honest about what is missing: PDFs give a screen reader nothing at all, because the renderer produces bitmaps with no text layer. That is the same reason you cannot copy text out of a PDF or search inside one. Fixing it properly means changing the PDF library, which is a bigger job.

Install

Gander-1.7-arm64.apk fits practically every phone from 2017 onward. Use the universal build for very old or x86 devices.

Verify before installing if you like. Signing certificate SHA-256:

5B:5C:F6:4A:94:23:7C:D5:F0:E0:85:76:00:38:BC:1C:EB:DF:18:DA:BA:5C:B3:EA:CA:7C:15:9F:22:A7:E2:4B

Gander 1.6

Share and locate: a share icon in the viewer toolbar sends the open file to any app, and a new "Show in file manager" menu item opens the file's folder in the system Files app. The folder item appears when Gander can work out the file's real location (picker, folder browsing, Open-with, downloads, gallery); cloud files and shared text have no folder to show, so it stays hidden there. No other changes.

Gander 1.5

Find in document: tap the search icon in the viewer to search inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, text and code files, with live match count and next/previous navigation. Honest note: PDF search is not included yet, the PDF renderer does not expose text extraction. No other changes.

Gander 1.4

Gander now appears in the Share sheet: share a document, photo, video or audio file from any app (chat, mail, browser) straight into it. Shared plain text opens in the text viewer. This was the most common way files arrive on a phone that Gander could not yet receive.

Gander 1.3.1

New app icon: a goose taking a gander at a fanned stack of files, matching the project artwork. The previous eye mark could read as surveillance, which is the opposite of what Gander stands for. No functional changes.

Gander 1.3

Thumbnail previews in Recent files and folder browsing: images (EXIF corrected), video frames and PDF first pages, generated off-thread with a memory + disk cache. Office and text files keep their colored type badges.

Gander 1.2

A useful home screen: Recent files (tap to reopen, long-press to remove) and Folders you grant once via the system picker, browsable in-app with type badges, sizes and dates. Still zero permissions. Note: Android refuses grants for the Downloads root; use Documents, DCIM or a Downloads subfolder.

Gander 1.1

Fixes and formats from real-device feedback: toolbar no longer sits under display cutouts (edge-to-edge insets), sideways photos display upright (EXIF), Markdown renders as formatted HTML, and video/audio playback lands via Media3 ExoPlayer (MP4, MKV, WebM, MOV, 3GP, AVI, FLV, TS + MP3, M4A, FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus).

Gander 1.0

First release as Gander. Offline, zero-permission Android viewer: PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx .xls .csv .ods), PowerPoint (.pptx), photos, GIF/SVG, Markdown, text and code. arm64 APK for normal phones, universal for everything else.