Preview app icon on macOS
At WWDC, Apple is rumored to bring a long-time Mac app to the iPhone and iPad — Preview.
Apple’s Preview app started in NeXTSTEP in the very late eighties. It had its origins in Quartz in Mac OS X in the very early days of macOS, but I’m afraid that my recollections of which Mac OS version made it fully available is lost in the depths of my mind.
And now, Apple is said to be bringing it to iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. According to a report on Friday by Bloomberg, it will be preinstalled and part of the operating system as a whole.
The report calls it an “in-house solution” to PDF management, annotation, and editing. While the latter two terms are true, the iPhone and iPad already have an effective PDF reader in iOS and iPadOS in Safari and Books.
There’s not much to the report about it, other that it will be coming in the fall to all users, preinstalled. What’s also not clear is if it is a “can opener” style app in iOS and iPadOS.
On macOS, it can be used to open BMP, GIF, JPEGs, PDFs obviously, PowerPoint, PhotoShop, and so many more file formats. This functionality is less-needed on iOS, but arguably would be welcome on iPadOS. How exporting functionality will work, if it does at all, isn’t clear yet either.
Also not clear is the extent that the app can be used for editing PDFs. There are some basic image correction tools in macOS, so we’ll see how that goes with time.
The addition of Preview is obvious, and welcome. While the PDF engine on Preview on macOS isn’t perfect, we’d still like it on Apple’s mobile platforms to be fully-featured, like it is on macOS.
