Privacy
Hola PDF does not collect, transmit or share any of your data — with us or anyone else. Your documents are scanned, read and kept on your device, and in your own iCloud if you use it. There are no accounts and no servers of ours. Apart from iCloud, which is Apple's and yours, the app connects to Apple's App Store for the optional Hola PDF Pro purchase, and to a web page only when you share that page to Hola PDF yourself. Summaries, answers and translations are made on your device by Apple's on-device models.
Hola PDF scans paper into PDFs and works with PDFs: it reads their text, marks them up, signs them, arranges their pages and locks them with a password. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
None. Hola PDF has no user accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising identifiers and no crash-reporting service. It never sends us — or anyone else — anything about you or your documents. We do not know how many people use it, what they scan, or whether they use it at all, because none of that is ever sent anywhere.
Your library is a folder of ordinary PDF files. If iCloud Drive is on for Hola PDF, that folder is the Hola PDF folder in your iCloud Drive, and Apple keeps it in step across your devices, as it does any other iCloud Drive folder. If it is off, the folder is on your device, under On My iPhone, On My iPad or the Mac's own storage. Either way it is yours, it appears in the Files app and the Finder, and we have no access to it.
Beside the files, Hola PDF keeps a small record of each document: its title, folder, tags, whether it is a favorite, its bookmarks, the page you were on, and the text read from it. With iCloud on, these records sync through your private iCloud database, which only your Apple Account can read. We cannot see it, and neither can anyone else.
Scanning uses the document camera built into iOS. Photos come in through the system photo picker, which is part of iOS rather than of Hola PDF: you choose photos there, and Hola PDF receives the ones you chose and nothing else. It cannot see the rest of your photo library. Image files come in only when you pick them.
Finding the page in a picture, straightening it, cleaning it up and reading its text all happen on your device, with Apple's Vision framework. Nothing is sent to a recognition service.
So that you can find a document from the Home Screen, its title and the text read from it are added to Spotlight's index on your device. The index is kept by iOS or macOS on that device; it is not sent to us.
Summaries, answers to your questions, scan names and tags, receipt details and the plain-language library search use Apple Intelligence's model on your device. The text of your document is given to that model on the device and nowhere else; Apple's on-device model does not send it to Apple or to us. On a device without Apple Intelligence, these features are not shown.
Translation uses Apple's Translation framework on your device, with language files the system downloads from Apple when you first choose a language. The words of your page do not leave the device.
When you add an expiry reminder, Hola PDF asks the system for permission to add to your reminders and writes one reminder, with the document's title and the line that named the date. It does not read your other reminders.
The Share Extension, the "Hola PDF" entry in the share sheet, saves the PDFs and photos you share into your library. When you share a web page from Safari, the extension loads that page, the way Safari just did, to make a PDF of it; the website sees an ordinary visit. It loads nothing you did not share.
When you request a signature, your name and message (if you wrote one) and the date are written into the PDF itself, and the file leaves your device only when you send it, by whatever means you choose. When you sign a document someone sent you, the signing record added to it holds the name you type, the time, the kind of device and its system version, how many places you signed, and a fingerprint (SHA-256) of the file as you received it; then the file goes back only when you send it. Nothing about a request passes through us: there is no server.
A document leaves Hola PDF only when you share it through the system share sheet. Sending it by Messages, Mail, AirDrop or any other app hands it to that app, and from then on it is governed by whatever you sent it through rather than by us.
With Handoff, the device you are reading on tells your other devices, through Apple, which document is open — its title and an identifier — and at which page, so you can carry on there. The document itself is not sent that way; your other device opens its own copy from your library.
Hola PDF is free, with one optional in-app purchase, Hola PDF Pro. That purchase goes through Apple's App Store. Apple tells the app whether it has been bought and nothing else: we receive no payment details, no Apple Account name and no record of who bought it. There is no subscription.
The free allowances — three signatures a month and one merge a day — are counted on your device only, in the app's own settings.
Hola PDF keeps a few settings of its own: whether you have seen the introduction, your scanning defaults, the lock setting, how the library is sorted and shown, the name you sign with (on this device only), and the free allowances above. It also keeps small page thumbnails in a cache that the system may clear, and an unfinished scan, so it is waiting when you come back. None of this contains anything about you, and none of it is sent anywhere.
There are none. Hola PDF has no advertising and no third-party SDKs; everything it does is Apple's frameworks and its own code.
Delete a document in Hola PDF, or delete its file in the Files app or the Finder, and it is gone from your library. Deleting the app removes its settings, its cache and, when iCloud is off, its folder. Documents in iCloud Drive stay there until you delete them, and your records in iCloud can be removed from your Apple Account's iCloud settings. Whether you bought Hola PDF Pro is kept by Apple with your Apple Account, so reinstalling and choosing Restore Purchases brings it back. There is nothing for us to delete, because none of it was ever sent to us.
Hola PDF does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age. Since the app collects nothing at all, this applies equally to everyone who uses it.
If this policy ever changes, we will update the date at the top of this page. Given how the app is built, with no server of ours and nothing kept about you, we do not expect that to happen often.
Questions about this policy or how Hola PDF handles your documents?
support@pablin.me