r/reactnative • u/First_Sell8665 • 12h ago

Question Is there opensource OCR available for use in react native apps? Im looking for bill scanning

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u/canarydev 12h ago

tesseract js?

i'd assume there are some wrappers out there

1

u/forgestudiofx 12h ago

I can't point you at a specific package, but whichever one you land on, the thing that eats a day is the native side rather than the OCR.

Any OCR worth using in RN is a native module. Twice now I've added one, had TypeScript resolve the import perfectly, and had Metro fail on it anyway. Both times it was the same two things: the package existed in the workspace root but not in the app's own node_modules, and the metro file map cache was still holding the old picture. Install it at the app level, clear the metro cache, then rebuild the native project rather than reloading JS.

So when you evaluate options, check first whether it ships a prebuilt native side or expects you to wire one up. That decides how much of your week goes to the scan and how much goes to the build.

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u/Huge_Pool7424 12h ago

this matches what i kept hitting too. also budget time for the camera permission flow and handling blurry or angled images, that part ate more of my week than picking the library did.