Try Preview on iPad and iPhone

Apple's productivity app has made it across from the Mac at last!

- CARRIE MARSHALL

ON THE MAC,Preview is one of our most-used apps: it’s where we fill out forms, annotate PDFs, and quickly adjust, strip the backgrounds from and combine multiple photos. It’s also one of the apps that people have most wanted on their iPhone and iPad, so its arrival in iOS 26 will make those people very happy: the mobile version of Preview in iOS/iPadOS 26 contains most of the key features found in the Mac version.

FUN WITH FORMSPreview on iPhone and iPad is surprisingly powerful. You can highlight, annotate and add comments to documents; take advantage of your device's camera to scan printed documents; see all the data about images, and even use your device to fill out forms and complete many parts of them automatically via AutoFill. Other than the opening screen, which has been designed for iPhone/iPad use rather than just taking you into an empty app — and which looks very like the ones in the mobile versions of Pages and Numbers — the biggest differences between the iPhone/iPad version of Preview and the Mac version is in what you can do with images. You get the Remove Background feature that makes it easy to paste an image into another one, but you can’t adjust the color balance, brightness, and contrast like on your Mac.

HOW TO Highlight, annotate and fill