Paperwren the permissions
Paperwren is a small document viewer built for Android, also available on Windows. It opens PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, CSV, markdown and plain-text files, and pictures.
It has no ads and no accounts, never touches the network, and the release APK requests zero Android permissions.
What it opens
| Format | How it is shown |
|---|---|
| Pages with text selection, find, contents and rotation. Password-protected files open. | |
| Word | The document's own page layout, fit to width, with find and go to page. |
| Excel, ODS, CSV | A grid with frozen rows and columns, merged cells, sheet tabs and find across every sheet. |
| PowerPoint | Slides drawn from their own shapes, themes, pictures and tables, with charts drawn from the numbers in the file. |
| Markdown, text, logs | Rendered markdown or plain text, with encoding detection. |
| Pictures | Fitted to the screen and zoomable. |
The bytes decide the format, not the file name. A file with the wrong extension still opens in the right viewer.
What it leaves out
It has no network access and no analytics. Links in a document are never followed: a web address is shown so you can copy it.
The release APK requests zero Android permissions.
Passwords for protected files are used once, in memory, and never stored.
Recents and settings live in app-private storage.
How it is built
Paperwren is a Tauri 2 app with a small Rust core and a React interface. Each viewer engine loads only when a file needs it. The interface comes in seven languages, including Urdu and Arabic, and those two mirror the app right to left.
A push to main runs CI and the release pipeline, which publishes a Windows installer and an Android APK. There have been 35 releases since September 2026.
Paperwren is open source, MIT licensed.