The big one: PDFs no longer need native code, so there is now one APK for every phone instead of four, and it is about 8 MB instead of 15.
PDFs now render with pdf.js
PDF rendering has moved off Pdfium and into the same sandboxed WebView that already handled Word, Excel and slides. That removes the last native code from the project, which is why the per-architecture builds are gone.
Very large PDFs are now read a piece at a time as you scroll rather than loaded whole, so a 50 MB scan opens sooner and does not sit in memory while you read it.
Two honest downsides:
- PDFs open around half a second slower on a fast phone. The renderer that was quicker cannot be shipped any more; it stopped being maintained and no longer meets current Play requirements.
- The search button no longer appears for PDFs. Pages are drawn as images with no text behind them, so a search could only ever come back empty. Search in Word, Excel, slides, Markdown, text and code is unchanged.
If your phone's Android System WebView is too old to run the renderer, the viewer now says so and names the version it needs, instead of sitting on "Rendering document…" with nothing to explain it.
Files Gander cannot recognise
Unsupported files now offer a View as text button instead of a dead end, so a file with no extension can be read without renaming it to .txt first. (#6, thanks @immanuelfodor)
That needed the text viewer to stop pushing whole files into the page. It now reads in 5 MB pages with a Show more button at the end, so a big log opens straight away instead of stalling, and none of it is out of reach. Files starting with a byte order mark, including UTF-16, decode correctly now instead of showing a stray character between every letter.
Everything else
- Targets Android 16 (API 36), so it keeps working as newer releases tighten how apps draw behind the status and navigation bars.
- The permission list is genuinely empty again. Media3 had been quietly adding
ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, which never did anything here because Gander only plays local files and has no internet access at all. The build now fails if any dependency adds a permission that has not been signed off. - The PDF viewer background fills the screen behind a short document, the same fix the other viewers got in 1.8.
Install
Gander-1.9.apk runs on every phone. There is no longer an arm64 build and a universal build to choose between, because the app ships no native code.
Viewing PDFs also needs Android System WebView 125 or newer (May 2024). Any phone still receiving WebView updates is well past that.
Verify before installing if you like. Signing certificate SHA-256:
5B:5C:F6:4A:94:23:7C:D5:F0:E0:85:76:00:38:BC:1C:EB:DF:18:DA:BA:5C:B3:EA:CA:7C:15:9F:22:A7:E2:4B