Release candidate

Pagewell

Every document, one tap away.

Website

Role: Sole developer: product, Android development, design, website and Play release.
Platform: Android
Timeline: 2026
Status: Release candidate

A CV in Word open in Pagewell, laid out as a real page

Pagewell Home: search, a Go Premium banner, Browse tiles for PDF, Word, Excel and Slides, and recent documents

A Q4 budget sheet in Excel open in Pagewell, with its header colours and totals

Overview

An all-document reader for Android that opens the PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text files people are sent, with PDF editing and signing, Word text editing and a set of PDF tools, all on the phone.

Problem

Document readers on Android are crowded with ads, ask for an account, or upload files to convert them. Pagewell opens files from any app's Open with menu, renders Office files offline on the phone, and charges for the editing tools instead of interrupting reading.

What I built

Reads PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx, .xls), PowerPoint (.pptx) and text files
Registers for Open with, so a file tapped in WhatsApp, Gmail or Files opens straight in Pagewell
Search, zoom, page jump, favourites and recent files
Edit PDF: write, draw, sign and highlight on any page
Edit Word: change the text of a .docx and save a new copy
Merge, extract pages, compress, lock and unlock PDFs, PDF to text and images to PDF
Light and dark themes, switched in one tap with a circular reveal
No ads while reading and no account; Pro weekly, monthly or yearly with a 7-day trial on yearly, and one free try of every Pro tool

Engineering

01
Office files rendered offline
Word, PowerPoint and old Excel files render in a WebView served from the app's own assets through WebViewAssetLoader, with network access blocked; .xlsx uses a native view that opens large sheets in milliseconds. Each renderer was chosen after a 30-file test on a real phone.
02
Fixing the renderers, not the files
The PowerPoint renderer took text colour from the shape fill, so white text vanished on coloured shapes; the bundle was patched to read the font reference. Word bullets in Symbol and Wingdings private-use characters are mapped to real ones after render.
03
Edits never overwrite the original
Edited PDFs and Word files are written as new files in Downloads/Pagewell through MediaStore, so a failed save or a bad edit leaves the file the user was sent untouched.