(Credit: Adobe)
After launching on iPhone earlier this year, Adobe's most popular editing tool is coming to Android devices. Photoshop for Android is now available in beta for smartphones and tablets.
This isn’t the full version of Photoshop you're used to on desktop, but it's more feature-rich than most mobile photo-editing tools, and brings some of Adobe's best features to Android devices for the first time. Adobe wants this to be a suitable alternative for those who use Photoshop on desktop, but it's also designed for users who primarily use their phone for editing.
Features in Photoshop for Android include the Spot Healing Brush to touch up images, the use of layers to help you combine images together, and the company’s Tap Select tool to help automatically grab individual parts of an image for moving or editing.
Newer Photoshop features like Generative Fill, using the company’s Firefly AI to automatically transform elements of an image, are also available here. You're limited in the amount of credits you can have each month, though.
Everything in the app is free at launch in what Adobe calls a “thank you for being a part of our beta community.” The app says the features are available for a “limited time only." There’s no clear date of when Photoshop for Android will lock away these features, but we'd expect it to come in the next few months when the company moves the app away from its beta stage.
When the service landed on iPhone, Adobe didn’t run this promotion; instead, you had to subscribe immediately to get the full feature set. It introduced a new mobile and web subscription that costs $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year. We'd expect Adobe to use this for Android subscriptions, too.
Adobe Photoshop for Android is available on the Google Play Store now, and it's compatible with all smartphones and tablets running Android 11 software or higher. You'll also need to have over 6GB of RAM onboard to handle it. We've experimented with the app on a Google Pixel 9 and found it worked well for editing images quickly.
Adobe has tried Android editing before. It started off with an app called Photoshop Touch, which was eventually discontinued in 2015. The service was much more limited than what Adobe is offering on its new Photoshop app.