You can run OCR on scanned PDFs directly on your iPhone without downloading any app — just use Safari and a browser-based OCR tool.
Navigate to pdfeditor.onl/ocr-pdf in Safari.
Upload your scanned PDF from Files or iCloud. Select the document language. Tap Scan All Pages. Tesseract OCR processes every page locally on your device.
Tip: iPhone processing speed depends on your model. iPhone 12 and later process OCR quickly; older models may take 30–60 seconds per page for complex documents.
Tap Save PDF. The searchable PDF downloads to your Files app. You can now search the text with Ctrl+F in any PDF viewer.
After the first visit, pdfeditor.onl caches in Safari. The OCR processing (Tesseract WebAssembly) runs entirely offline on your device.
Yes — completely free in Safari on iPhone.