This app brings the Pixel Screenshots experience to any Android device

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

It’s hard to put together a list of the best Android apps because there are just so many to pick from and everyone’s tastes are different. Some of the best apps do something unique that no other app replicates, while others are simply the best in their category. I’m particularly fond of apps that replicate functionality unique to particular devices, as those give me the freedom to use whatever Android phone I want. That’s why when I learned of a new app called PixelShot, which basically copies Google’s Pixel Screenshots app, I was excited to try it out.

Pixel Screenshots, if you aren’t familiar, is an app that’s exclusive to the Google Pixel 9 series. It uses on-device AI to analyze the screenshots that you take, extract text and other pertinent info from those screenshots, and then make a database that you can later search through using the app. As an example, imagine you take a screenshot of a text message or email sent by your Airbnb host that contains a smart lock code. When you arrive at your Airbnb, you can open the Pixel Screenshots app and search “code” to quickly find that screenshot with the information you need.

The new PixelShot app by developer Mehul Kanzariya takes this idea and makes it available to any Android phone, but with a few caveats that I’ll get to in a bit. Like Pixel Screenshots, the PixelShot app processes your screenshots to extract text from them. It then uses an AI model to generate summaries of that text which you can later search through using the app’s built-in search feature. You can even manually add notes to individual screenshots and organize them into collections, just like in Pixel Screenshots. The best part is that PixelShot is free, doesn’t have any ads, and works on any device running Android 11 and later.

So what’s the catch? Well, for starters, PixelShot isn’t as private as Pixel Screenshots is. The developer says that your screenshots themselves are never uploaded to the cloud, which is good, however he says that the text from your screenshots is uploaded to the cloud so an AI model can summarize it. Specifically, the developer says the app extracts text from your screenshots locally using the on-device text extraction machine learning model provided by Google’s ML Kit SDK. It then uploads that text to a Llama 3 8B Instruct hosted on Replicate to summarize the raw text and generate a relevant title. The extracted text isn’t saved on the cloud, according to the developer. Meanwhile, the AI-generated title and summary are stored locally on the device using a Room Database.

Because there’s a cloud component to this app, the developer can’t guarantee the app will be free forever. In fact, he says that once usage of his app increases, he’s planning on adding in-app purchases and ads to pay for the API fee.

These are understandable limitations given the constraints the app is working under. Hopefully once the Gemini Nano API is opened up more broadly, PixelShot can utilize Nano to summarize text entirely on-device. The initial version of Gemini Nano available on most devices doesn’t support images, though, so the app will still need to rely on ML Kit to extract text.

Speaking of which, the fact that PixelShot can only handle text in screenshots is another difference between it and Pixel Screenshots. If you take a screenshot of something that doesn’t have any text in it, say a red shoe, then PixelShot won’t be able to generate a relevant summary for it. Furthermore, the app doesn’t process screenshots in the background, so you’ll need to open it up on occasion to have it analyze them.

In any case, give PixelShot a try if you’re looking for something like Google’s Pixel Screenshots, but you don’t have a Pixel 9. Even if it isn’t perfect, it gets the job done and works exactly as described. If you find yourself taking a lot of screenshots so you can remember things later on, then it could save you some trouble down the road.

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