What Was Google Stack?

Google Stack was a document-scanning and -filing app. It d𒅌igitally p🐎hotographed and stored receipts, bills, and other papers as PDFs, organizing them into different categories.

Free to download, it was available exclusively for Android phones and tablets in the United States. It was incorporated into the Google Drive app as of late July 2024—because Google shut down support for Stack starting the week of Sept. 23, 2024.

How Google Stack Worked

Launched on March 30, 2021, Google Stack was created by Area 120, the in-house incubator of Google, owned by Alphabet Inc. (GOOG and GOOGL).

When Stack could be downloaded from the Google Play store, you began to use it by photographing a document. The app would scan it, title it for you, and suggest the right category, or “stack” (get the name now?), for you to store it in, based on details within the doc. You could also import and scan existing PDFs or photos of documents already on your Android smartphone.

The stacks had names, such as Bills, Receipts, Banking, House, IDs, Vehicles, Insurance, Legal, Medical, Tax, and Travel. If you didn’t like the preset suggestions, you could change the file name, slot the doc into another stack, or create a category of your own. You could put a PDF into more than one stack, and you could edit a file’s appearance (crop, color) as well—though the app automatically did a lot of digital enhancement. One professional app reviewer was particularly impressed by Stack’s ability to gather information from and categorize a highly crumpled receipt.

Google Stack Strong Points

. The biggest deal with Stack’s was its organizing function—the way that it “read” and filed a document.

This ability to analyze and zero in on key data also allowed you to search for your stacked docs in various ways: by a store name, a bill’s due date, a sum of money, etc. The app also enabled full-text searches within a doc.

Another of Stack’s selling points was its ability to sync with Google Drive; you could opt to automatically save a copy of your stacked documents there, for access on a desktop or laptop. That way, your scans will always be available, should you ever decide to stop using Stack—or after Google discontinued support for it in late September 2024.

Reactions to Google Stack

Stack received largely favorable reviews on the Google Play store. As of April 2024, the app had a 4.7-star rating (out of five) from 6,680 reviewers. “Use this app daily” and “amazing app” were typical kudos. Complaints centered on the artificial intelligence (AI) aspect and difficulty switching cameras.

Some responders expressed big data concerns, given 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:how Google makes money. But according to Google’s commitment-to-privacy policy of Workspace, the company will “never use customer data or service data (such as usage activity) for ads targeting.”

Google Stack Competitors

Document-scanning and -digitizing services are not new: CamScanner, one of the oldest, dates back to 2011. Some of the leading mobile apꦑps that Google Stack competed with include:

• Microsoft Office Lens for iPhone and Android, which lets you save to OneNote or OneDrive
  
• Tiny Scanner, with versions for iOS and Android devices
• Adobe Scan for iOS and Android, which can upload PDFs or JPEGs to Adobe Document Cloud