Resecta: Redact PDFs
Remove text, not just cover it
Only for iPhone
Free
iPhone
Redact PDFs on your iPhone. Resecta is designed to remove the text under each redaction, not just cover it, then checks the output before you share. Free and open source.
Resecta redacts PDFs entirely on your iPhone. A black box drawn over text can leave the text underneath readable; Resecta is designed to remove the text in the regions you mark, then checks the output before you share.
Find what to redact
• Search by text, regular expression or a list of terms, and save the searches you reuse.
• Scan looks for 17 kinds of personal information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers, and card and account numbers (many are US formats).
• Draw a rectangle by hand over anything else.
Search and Scan results arrive unselected; nothing is redacted without your selection.
Redact
Marks show what will be removed. Tap Redact and Resecta rebuilds the PDF from page images, with the marked regions overwritten in the pixels. Secure Rasterization produces image-only output. Searchable Redaction keeps the text outside your redactions searchable, for PDFs that have a text layer.
Check before you share
Verification runs 7 checks on Secure Rasterization output and 12 on Searchable Redaction output, including text extraction, OCR, a search of the file's bytes, a metadata check, a re-run of the searches you applied, and a detection sweep. What they find is listed, and sharing a file with reported issues asks you to confirm. Verification is a check, not a substitute for your review.
Private by design
No accounts, no analytics, no data collection. The app makes no network requests of its own, and you can use it in airplane mode.
Good to know
• PDF files only, up to 50 MB and 500 pages. Encrypted PDFs are not supported.
• Resecta doesn't store your documents or edits; share or save the redacted copy to keep it.
• Name detection uses an on-device language model from iOS. Where it is unavailable, name results are reduced and the app says so.
Free and open source under Apache-2.0. Source: github.com/Merlin1A/resecta
Ratings & Reviews
Verification now re-runs your searches and a detection sweep on the redacted file. This release opens PDF files only; image import (JPEG, PNG, HEIC) from 1.0 and 1.1 is removed.
Verification
• After a redaction, each search you applied is run again on the output, and the app's detectors are run over it (names and addresses are not swept). Anything that remains is reported.
• Secure Rasterization output now gets 7 checks and Searchable Redaction output 12.
• Words fully inside a region you drew by hand, on a page with a text layer, are checked too. A redacted term still readable outside the redacted regions is reported as Attention Needed, naming the text.
• When the output has no text layer, these checks read the rendered pages with OCR and say so; pages they could not read are listed, not counted as clear.
• Verification Details has a new layout: a summary, then findings and notes, and a statement of what the run did not cover.
Search and Scan
• The minimized bar steps through matches with Previous and Next, centers each match on the page, and applies the current match with one tap.
• Delete All for saved searches; your own regex patterns are listed above the built-in ones.
• In Scan, names are recognized after a label's colon, a sign-off or a salutation; a labelled account number is no longer read as a phone number.
Import and export
• A document carrying JavaScript or a launch action in its catalog, its open action, a page's actions or an annotation's action is refused at import. Links inside an imported document are not followed in the editor.
• The producer tag, the creation and modification timestamps, and the file identifier in exported files are rewritten to fixed or content-derived values, and the metadata check confirms all three.
The developer, Jesse Brookins, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Jesse Brookins
- Size
- 51.5 MB
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 26.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Jesse Brookins
