Google Play has a lot more fax apps than the App Store, and that’s not a good thing. Search it and you’ll wade through pages of near-identical credit-farms — install, watch an advert, earn enough credits for half a page, watch another advert. A few of them work. Most exist to serve you ads while you’re stressed about a document.
Underneath that noise there are eight apps genuinely worth considering. We installed all eight on two handsets — a current phone and one about four years old, because Android testing on new hardware only tells you half the story — and sent the same documents through each.
First, work out which sort of app you need
There are only three business models on Google Play, and picking the wrong one is where people waste money.
Credit apps charge per page. You buy a bundle, or in some cases watch adverts to earn pages. Sensible if you fax twice a year. Awful if you fax twice a month, and the maths turns against you faster than you’d think.
Desktop services with an Android app attached. These started life as web products for office workers, and the app is a small window onto a web account. You’ll spot them by how often they bounce you into a browser to change a setting.
Subscription apps built for the phone. One flat fee, everything in the app. The best value if you fax at all regularly, and the only category where the phone is treated as the actual machine rather than a remote control.
Here’s how the eight land.
1. Municorn Fax
The one that behaves like an Android fax app rather than a website in a costume.
It carries the highest ratings of anything here — 4.4 from more than 60,000 reviews on Google Play, across 3 million-plus installs — and having used it on both handsets, we can see why people stay.
It’s light. That matters more on Android than anywhere else, because “works fine” on a flagship and “works fine” on a four-year-old phone with a tired battery are different claims. This one ran the same on both. The full feature set was available on the older device too: in-app scanning, combining several documents into one fax, pulling files from cloud storage, previews before you send. Nothing gated behind having a better phone.
Fax quality was the strongest on test. We put the same page through Municorn and iFax side by side and the difference was visible — more detail preserved, cleaner lines, less of the mush you get when a scan has been compressed too hard.
The area-code feature deserves a mention. You pick your own fax number and your own area code, whether or not you live there, and when you’re typing a recipient’s number it shows you the city that code belongs to. That’s a small thing that stops a real mistake.
It’s a subscription, and there’s no free tier. What the subscription buys is no ceiling — unlimited pages, sending and receiving both, no per-page charge and nothing extra for international. The team also replies to Play Store reviews individually rather than pasting the same line under each one, which is rarer than it should be.
The catch: no scheduled send, and no advanced document editing. If you need to queue faxes for a specific time, Fax.Plus does that and this doesn’t.
Get Municorn Fax on comfax.com
2. Fax.Plus
The feature list winner.
Scheduled sending, document signing, cloud integration, and the best scanner on test for edge detection — we didn’t have to correct a single scan manually. Cover pages are properly customisable. It’s built by a serious team and it feels like it.
Two problems. Pages are capped and the tiers take real effort to compare. And on our older handset the interface didn’t fit the screen correctly, leaving menus and buttons looking squashed — if your phone is a few years old, try before you commit.
3. Genius Fax
Brilliant scanning. Shame it’s in a different app.
The companion to Genius Scan, which is one of the best-rated scanners on any platform. That’s the appeal and the whole problem: you can’t scan inside Genius Fax. Scan in one app, switch, send in the other. You can’t merge documents in the fax app either. On our older phone, app-switching sometimes crashed and lost progress.
Its own Play rating sits at 3.4 — modest, and worth weighing against Genius Scan’s much better one, since they’re separate products. Pricing is a hybrid: credits per page, plus a separate subscription if you want a number of your own to receive on. The support operation behind it is genuinely good, with MDM compatibility and proper enterprise options.
4. iFax
Excellent, once you’ve paid to make the pop-ups stop.
Slick, capable, and the customer support is the best of the eight — live chat, real onboarding, quick answers. If something goes wrong at the worst moment, these are the people you want.
Getting there is tiring. Constant upgrade prompts in the app, blocked features waved in front of you, and enough “Upgrade to Pro” emails that one of us blocked the sender. Receiving costs considerably more than sending. On the top plan it’s a strong product; below it, you’re being marketed at.
5. Easy Fax
Free, if you’ll pay in adverts.
Over a million installs and 3.9 from more than 21,000 reviews, which is respectable. It’s simple and it does the job, and the reason people like it is the ad-for-credits option — you can genuinely fax without spending anything, if your time is worth less than the adverts. Transmission is end-to-end encrypted, which is more than some of this list can say.
Support is thin, though, and the app tells you very little about who’s behind it.
6. Tiny Fax
The best-looking app here by a mile, with a billing model that undoes it.
Clean use of colour, clear icons, nothing cluttered, and you can filter your faxes by status — a genuinely useful feature almost nobody else offers. We enjoyed using it.
Then: sending and receiving are billed as two separate subscriptions. Two things to manage, two things to remember to cancel. It was also the slowest to transmit and the slowest to confirm delivery, it struggled on the older handset, and — oddly — you can’t look back at faxes you’ve already sent. Its 4.2 rating from 22,000-plus reviews is well earned on looks. The negative reviews all get the same copy-pasted reply.
7. FaxFile
Faxes fastest. Looks like Windows 95.
There’s no in-app scanner, which almost every rival has. There’s no receiving at all — that’s a separate app from the same developer, at a separate price. You can’t preview your document before sending, and you find your recipient’s rate by scrolling a price list by hand.
And yet it sent our test faxes faster than anything else on the list. It’s pay-per-page with an ad-for-credits option. If you want a blunt tool that does one job, it’s charming. If you want it to look like it was made this decade, it isn’t. Its Play rating sits at 3.7.
8. MyFax
Cheap number, tired app.
The budget option from the eFax family, and the least expensive way here to own a fax number outright. That’s the case for it. Against it: a 2.4 rating on Google Play, the lowest of anything we tested, and an app that feels like a legacy web product squeezed onto a phone. Read the recent reviews before you sign up.
What we’d install tonight
If you fax once a year and don’t mind adverts, Easy Fax will get it done for nothing. If you need faxes to leave at a set time, Fax.Plus. If your office already runs on eFax’s family, MyFax keeps you compatible.
For everyone else, Municorn Fax. It ran identically on a new phone and an old one, it produced the cleanest faxes of the eight, it doesn’t meter your pages, and it has the ratings — 4.4 from over 60,000 reviewers — of an app people keep rather than uninstall once the crisis passes. On a platform this full of apps designed to sell you adverts, one that just sends the fax and gets out of the way stands out.
