It may be a beta, and will therefore see changes and improvements before becoming a full release, but this mobile port of Photoshop signals not only Adobe’s belief in apps outside iOS, but how well they can work on a small screen.
For
Effective mobile image editing
Familiar tools
Against
Portrait orientation only
Not compatible with all devices
Needs fast internet connection
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Adobe’s push into mobile platforms continues with the release of a version of Photoshop for Android. It’s labelled a beta, so expect a few things to change before the final version comes along. You can find it right now on the Google Play Store, but I found it could be a little picky about which devices it would install on. A Google Pixel 6 phone, from 2021, was fine, but a bang-up-to-date Android tablet from Honor wouldn’t install the app.
This could be because it’s optimised for phones, and indeed it has plenty in common with the Photoshop iPhone app, which is again different to the one you can get for iPad. It likes to run in portrait orientation, which will annoy anyone whose brain automatically flips into landscape mode after years of working with 16:9 screens, but is what the kids want with their TikToks and Instabooks. While there are currently no mobile apps on our big list of the best photo editing software, it’s surely only a matter of time before one comes along that can challenge desktop apps at their own game.
Key specifications
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OS
Android 11 or newer
Device RAM
6GB (8GB recommended)
Device compatibility
Not all devices supported
Price
Free (for a limited time)
Setup and getting started
(Image credit: Future / Adobe)
• Easy to install • Doesn't work on all devices
Setup is extremely easy - you just find it on the Google Play Store (which can be challenging as Photoshop Express keeps getting in the way - the Photoshop Beta icon is lighter in colour, like the beta version of the desktop app) and install it if your device is supported.
Run it, and you’ll be asked to sign in with your Creative Cloud account. The app is free ‘for a limited time’ - this means you’ll still need to log in, but if you don’t have a Photoshop subscription on your CC account, it won’t matter. There's no clue as to when this free period will end, but it seems a reasonable guess that once the beta period is up, a sub will be required, and it seems likely it will be included with a desktop Photoshop sub in the same way as the iPad app. If you are a subscriber, you’ll get extra stock photo and generative AI credits within the app.
Get past that stage, and you’ll be invited to open an existing image from your Photos app, start a new composition with a selection of templates from square Instagram posts to 11x17-inch prints, or open an Adobe Stock image. Kudos to Adobe for making it so simple, though it doesn’t stay that way once you start delving into the editing features.
Setup and getting started score: 4/5
Features
(Image credit: Future / Adobe)
• Familiar tools • Unfamiliar layout
Once you’ve got an image or a blank canvas open, you’ll be able to start editing. The editing tools are at the bottom of the screen, with the top part dedicated to image display - this changes once you open one of the tools that has extra options, and they will fly up to fill the screen so that you can make your choice.
There are a lot of features here that you’ll recognise from the desktop app, though the way they're implemented is very different. So you get selections, masks, layers, adjustment layers and blending. There's a Spot Healing brush, a Clone Stamp and Remove tool. The Magic Wand is here, along with Object Select and a new selection tool tailored to the needs of a touchscreen: Tap Select. This works a little like the selection brush, but it also crashed the app. This is beta software, so that sort of thing is to be expected.
There's also Generative Fill, and the app comes with a warning that working with large, complex files can become slow if you have a slow internet connection. This suggests the AI processing, or at least some part of it, is taking place on Adobe’s servers rather than on the phone itself. And this makes a lot of sense, because while phones have come a long way in the processing power department, they still don’t have the kind of GPUs and NPUs that can run generative AI locally. As the app requires 6GB of RAM and recommends 8GB, it’s clearly using a lot of processing resources.
As you’d also expect from a smartphone app, you have the opportunity to share your images directly to social media. This, combined with the friendly templates you can use to start working with, maybe this version of Photoshop’s killer feature - it’s a complete social media workflow, able to take images from your phone camera or cloud storage folders, edit them, and blast them out to the world with no additional laptop or other equipment required. There are plenty of apps that can already do this, but none have the depth of control over the finished result that Adobe offers here.
Feature score: 4/5
User experience
(Image credit: Future / Adobe)
• Takes a bit of getting used to • Lots of powerful tools
Using Photoshop with your finger isn’t remotely the same as the mouse pointer version - you have a much more constrained space to work in, you have to keep using two fingers to zoom and reposition the image, and things like the Layers palette is hidden unless you’re specifically using it, in which case it pops up to fill the screen.
It’s going to take a bit of getting used to, and poses the question of whether this is really Photoshop, or a mobile editing app released under the Photoshop name that has access to the whole Adobe back-end. What’s clear is that some people are going to get very good at using this very quickly, and the skills you’ll have picked up using the desktop version of the app will transfer over in part - things are named the same, and you won’t be left wondering about the difference between Multiply and Screen on the Blending Modes palette.
There are some things from desktop Photoshop that are just not possible to replicate on a small touchscreen, however, and so there's an emphasis on automatic selection rather than pixel-perfect mouse manipulation here. Tap Select is a bit like the Select Subject that’s crept into the desktop app via the floating toolbar. It relies on object detection, and in a test image that had a pretty clear outline on it, against a plain background, it claimed it couldn’t find a subject. This may be something to be improved on, or perhaps the choice of test image could have been better, but you can usually trust Adobe to get this sort of thing right.
User experience score: 4/5
Who is it for?
• Social media masters
This is going to be the perfect app for social media posters who have outgrown the simpler image editing apps on the market. It offers deep, highly intricate image editing in a format that makes it easy to share your creations. The fact it’s always with you, no laptop or tablet required, is another point in its favour.
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Adobe Photoshop for Android Beta score card
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Design:
Photoshop condensed to a phone screen.
4/5
Features:
Lots of tools you'll recognise from the desktop app.
4/5
User experience:
Better than you might expect from a beta app.
4/5
Buy it if...
You want to transfer your desktop skills to mobile
Current mobile photo editors aren’t enough
You’d like to give Adobe feedback on the beta
Don't buy it if...
You don’t mind carrying a laptop
Mobile apps aren't your thing
The Verdict
8
out of 10
Adobe Creative Cloud
It may be a beta, and will therefore see changes and improvements before becoming a full release, but this mobile port of Photoshop signals not only Adobe’s belief in apps outside iOS, but how well they can work on a small screen.
Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5. He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs, but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two. When not sweating over page layout or photo editing, you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables.
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