Adobe Acrobat Reader review

Adobe Acrobat Reader covers the most common Android PDF jobs for free. Adobe's Google Play listing says you do not need a subscription to read, fill in or sign PDFs, and that you can read PDFs without an Adobe account. The free tier highlights text, adds comments and sticky notes, and signs forms with your finger through Fill & Sign. Liquid Mode reflows a PDF to fit a phone screen, which helps with long documents. Acrobat Premium, which starts with a 7-day free trial, edits text and images, adds paragraphs, creates PDFs from photos and Office files, converts PDFs to Word, Excel or PowerPoint, merges and compresses files, reorders and crops pages, runs OCR on scans and password-protects PDFs. The AI Assistant that summarizes and answers questions about PDFs is listed as a paid feature. The main gap is cost clarity: Adobe's pricing page blocked our checks from outside the US, so the Premium price is marked pending.

Who it is for

most Android users who fill in and sign PDFs

Price

Free to read, fill in and sign; Acrobat Premium adds editing. See vendor pricing (USD check pending).

US price check pending. See the vendor pricing page.

Key features

• Read, fill in and sign PDFs without a subscription
• Fill & Sign lets you sign forms with your finger
• Acrobat Premium edits text and images, fixes typos and adds paragraphs
• Premium converts PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or image files
• Premium OCR turns scanned documents into searchable, editable text

Strengths and weaknesses

• Strength: No Adobe account needed to read PDFs
• Strength: Opens files from Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, email and the phone
• Strength: Liquid Mode reflows text to fit a phone screen
• Weakness: Editing text, merging and compressing need Acrobat Premium
• Weakness: AI Assistant is a paid add-on for Acrobat Individual customers
• Weakness: USD price for Premium could not be confirmed from our location

Key facts

• Free tier: Read, comment, fill in and sign
• Premium trial: 7 days
• Installs: More than 635 million (vendor figure)
• Cloud sources: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox

Where it ranks

Adobe Acrobat Reader is No. 1 in our Best PDF Editors for Android verdict and No. 4 in Best PDF Editors for iPad.