Hey Siri, scan my mail

I have a hard time keeping on top of my mail. Sometimes the mail is important and should be filed away, but I'm not in the right place to actually complete that task. Here's what I want: I'd like to collect my mail from the mailbox, open it, discard the junk mail, and digitize the rest with as little friction as possible.

At home, I have a fancy-pants HP printer that includes a double-sided document-feed scanner. HP has their own app, which I don't care for. It's overly complicated, and it tries to do too many different things. There's a loading screen for everything, and it's way too slow to get around.

I began searching for a well-designed third-party app that could do the same thing, but all the "document scanner" apps rely on your phone's camera instead of connecting to a hardware scanner. I thought about how difficult it would be to roll my own, and it turns out that HP has a mobile scan SDK! ...which you need to apply for access to.

Eventually I came to a wonderful realization – wouldn't be great if I could invoke a scan as an Apple Shortcuts step? The scanned document would be the output of the step, and could be uploaded to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any other app that exposes steps to the Apple Shortcuts app. And the best part is that the shortcut could be invoked with Siri: "Hey Siri, scan my mail". My mail could be scanned and uploaded without having to tap any buttons!

Sometimes, my mail is something I need to take action on (bills to pay, solicitations I want to follow-up on). Maybe I could scan the document and attach it to a reminder right away? This could also be accomplished in Apple Shortcuts! "Hey Siri, scan this and remind me about it"

I dug around in HP's app a little more, and discovered they already have a "Shortcuts" feature, but it's not integrated with Apple shortcuts. Instead, they tried to build it in-house and have separate integrations with each cloud storage provider. This means there's no Siri integration (a key benefit of the Apple approach), and no way to extend the workflow to other apps (e.g. creating reminders).

I've gone ahead and applied for access to their Mobile Scan SDK, but I'm a little pessimistic that they'll grant me access given that my stated goal is to replicate a function in their own app.