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Gander, an Android file viewer that asks for no permissions

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Hi HN,I built an Android file viewer that opens PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, video, audio, Markdown and code, and asks for no permissions at all.I have always been uneasy about opening files people send me. On Android you either install a 400 MB office suite and sign in or use a small free viewer that wants storage access and ends up uploading your file to a server to render it. Also the hassle of having to download different apps for different file formats was really annoying.Gander holds no permissions, not even INTERNET so the OS itself guarantees the file cannot leave the phone.PDFs use Pdfium, media uses Media3, and Office formats are rendered by bundled JS libraries in a WebView and so no request goes to any server.It is a viewer only. Complex PowerPoint decks come out approximately right, spreadsheet charts are not drawn, and old binary .doc and .ppt are unsupported. I'll work on it as issues come up :PIt is 14 MB, MIT licensed and uploaded on Github releases.Do try it! I would love some feedback especially on files that render badly or need new support.

HN · launched Jul 31, 2026 · 211 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views

Niche: developer data and local file viewers · 49 launches, 9 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 49 launches in developer data and local file viewers →

Could you build this?

Partial While an Android shell is simple, bundling isolated offline renderers for PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Markdown, and media without requesting external network/storage permissions requires compiling and embedding heavy native parsing libraries.

What it would actually take: The app requires building an Android project in Kotlin utilizing the Android Storage Access Framework (SAF) to read file URIs without broad storage permissions. The hard part is packaging self-contained, lightweight offline renderers for Microsoft Office formats, PDFs, and code (typically requiring ported C/C++ libraries like LibreOffice/Poppler via NDK or heavyweight Java ports like Apache POI/Pdfium) while keeping apk size manageable and memory usage bounded. This demands Android NDK and document specification parsing expertise.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: AFWall+, F-Droid, Obtanium

Concerns raised: Newer Android SDK versions require filesystem permissions that may break compatibility, App may not work long-term due to SDK version constraints, Banking apps and other apps refuse to run on rooted devices, Google Play Store verification process

Feature requests: iOS version, Support for .rtf files, Upload to app store

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 350 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #3 of 351 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 211 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.