You spot a quote on Instagram you want to save, a product name buried in a YouTube comment, or an address tucked inside an X post, and the moment you long-press to copy, nothing happens. The app just won’t let you. So, my workaround was embarrassingly low-tech: take a screenshot, squint at it later, and retype it manually.
Then I found Universal Copy, a free app from Camel Corporation that removes one of Android’s most annoying limitations — and it does much more than just copy and paste on your phone. It ranks high among the amazing Android apps that will change how you use your phone.
- OS
-
Android
- Price model
-
Free (in-app purchases)
Copy text from any screen with Universal Copy, even in apps that normally block it. Grab words from images, apps, and menus with just a tap.
Universal Copy works by overlaying your screen with selectable text zones
The moment you activate it from your notification bar
The first thing to understand about Universal Copy is that it runs as an accessibility service, relying on the same framework as TalkBack to read the screen and interact with your device. This allows it to read whatever text is currently on your screen, regardless of which app you’re in. After installing the app from the Play Store, you open it, tap to enable the service, and get directed to your device’s Accessibility settings, where you flip the switch for Universal Copy. That’s the entire setup. From that point forward, the app sits in the background, ready whenever you need it.
Activating it is just as frictionless. A persistent notification lives in your notification shade with a single button: “Activate Universal Copy mode.” Pull down the panel, tap it, and every block of text the app detects gets wrapped in a soft highlight. This is what the app calls text zones, and you can tap any of them to select it. A single tap selects; a double tap copies directly to your clipboard, and a long press opens an edit view. If you prefer faster access, you can also add Universal Copy as a Quick Settings tile or assign it to a long press of your volume or back button, which I’ve found far easier during a reading session.
I didn’t realize how much time I was wasting until I tried this clipboard app
Copy on one device, paste on another instantly.
Once you’re in copy mode, the experience is effortless. I’ve used it in Instagram captions, YouTube comments, news apps, e-book readers, and locked PDF viewers — anywhere that used to be a dead end. The text zones are accurate, the interface stays out of the way, and when you’re done, a single tap closes the overlay.
One clever feature you should also take note of is the Scroll Mode. If the text you want spans more than one screen (think a long Reddit thread or a multi-paragraph article), you don’t have to copy section by section. You activate Universal Copy, select what you need on the first screen, scroll down, and the app automatically relaunches, allowing you to keep adding to your selection across screens and even across different apps. It all ends up in a single consolidated copy, which alone has saved me a significant amount of time.
Universal Copy does more than basic copying
Reads text buried inside images and smartly pulls out phone numbers, addresses, and hashtags
Normal Mode handles apps that won’t let you select text. But Scanner Mode goes a step further by letting you extract text from images, scanned documents, photos of books, screenshots, or anything where the text is literally part of a picture rather than selectable UI content. It uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology and, as of the time of writing, supports Latin scripts (English, Portuguese, and others), as well as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Devanagari character sets, including Hindi. I’ve used it to pull quotes from photos of printed pages, and the accuracy on clean images is consistently solid.
To use it, you simply switch to Scanner Mode from within the Universal Copy interface before activating the overlay. The app then scans the visual content on your screen and surfaces any text it finds as selectable zones, just like Normal Mode does with digital text.
More interestingly, the smart entity detection is baked into both modes. When Universal Copy reads a screen, it doesn’t just see a wall of text; it identifies and categorizes specific data types. Phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, @mentions, hashtags, dates, and URLs all get flagged in dedicated tabs at the bottom of the interface. So if you’re looking at an Instagram post crammed with tagged accounts and hashtags, you don’t have to hunt for them manually. They’re already sorted and waiting for you to select or copy.
This feeds into the quick action system, which is one of my favorite touches. After selecting text, you don’t have to just copy it — you can immediately translate it, open an address in Maps, search it on the web, or share it to another app, all without leaving Universal Copy. It removes the usual copy > switch app > paste dance entirely.
On the customization side, the settings panel gives you fine-grained control over how the app behaves. You can configure what a double-tap or long-press does, set a preferred language for Scanner Mode, adjust the selection order for multi-zone picks, and enable Text Zones Preview, which shows you all available text areas before you start selecting. There’s also a background running option that prevents the accessibility service from getting killed by aggressive battery optimizers on some devices, which is worth enabling if you find the app deactivating on its own. This is crucial because, while it is generally good advice to stop closing background apps on Android, the system can sometimes be too aggressive with utilities that need to stay awake to function.
The free version is likely all you’ll ever need
Universal Copy is free and ad-supported. The Plus subscription removes ads and, depending on your usage, is worth considering if you use the app daily. Either way, the core functionality costs nothing, and for an app that scratches a very specific itch and removes the friction from one of the most basic smartphone tasks, that feels like a fair deal.
