RE: I want to open a pdf file in app inventor

I would suggest that the easiest thing to do is use SAF to pick a file from /Documents and copy it to your ASD. Then you know you have read/write for your app on that file. Then you can run the GoogleOCR on it.

Using SAF should ensure that you can access any file from your /Documents folder, regardless of whether your app created / owns the file or not.

ref