Show HN: Turn your iPhone into a local OCR server using Vision Framework

Re:Show HN: Turn your iPhone into a local OCR server using V... by skyzouwdev on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @12:55PM (#44890892)

That’s a cool approach. Running OCR locally avoids the usual privacy and latency trade-offs, and turning the phone into a network-accessible endpoint is clever.

Curious about performance — how fast is the Vision Framework on-device compared to something like Tesseract or cloud OCR APIs? And does the app stay responsive if the phone is handling multiple requests at once?

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Re:Show HN: Turn your iPhone into a local OCR server using V... by riddleling on Thursday August 14, 2025 @09:09AM (#44899949)

I tested it on my iPhone SE 2, and the performance was not great. I’ll run new tests after I get a new iPhone.

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Re:Show HN: Turn your iPhone into a local OCR server using V... by riddleling on Sunday August 24, 2025 @07:55AM (#45003545)

I just switched the HTTP server from Swifter to Vapor, and changed the text recognition API from VNRecognizeTextRequest to RecognizeTextRequest. The OCR speed is faster now—feel free to try it out!

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