Robert Triggs / Android Authority
The Pixel 10 phones come with a slew of smart features — everything is AI-driven and feels futuristic, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. In contrast, iOS 26 for iPhones is less about AI and more about visual upgrades. I don’t mind Liquid Glass, honestly — I could play with the refraction all day long, if the heavy animations don’t eat into the battery before that.
But there’s one handy little tool in iOS 26, borrowed straight from the Mac, that I’ve become a solid fan of. If Google ever brought something similar to Android and Pixels, I’d personally visit Mountain View to shake Sundar Pichai’s hand.
Pixel users: does this iOS 26 feature make you jealous? 13 votes 100% jealous 15 % A little jealous, yeah 23 % Not at all 62 %
The Preview review
Mahmoud Itani / Android Authority
Preview has long been a Mac staple that’s now ingrained in my workflow. Its biggest feat is that I can press the spacebar to instantly preview any file — PDFs, images, videos — without waiting for a separate app to load. It just sits in the background, ready whenever you need it.
Particularly for PDFs, it’s an absolute gem of a tool. You can mark up, fill forms, add text, insert shapes, and more. What I rely on most is its digital signature tool. It’s not some random handwriting font you typically find on PDF editors, but my actual signature that I drew on the trackpad. At this point, I literally can’t live without it. It’s indispensable, given how many documents I have to e-sign each month.
The iOS 26 port
Apple has now ported the same Preview app to iPhones, and I had a moment of happiness when I first saw it in action. On iOS 26, it’s limited to PDFs alone, but that’s still a huge win. It’s layered with the new Liquid Glass design, with minimal menus spread neatly across the top and bottom. You get loads of handy features, like forced dark backgrounds, cropping PDFs, adding text boxes for forms, and more.
If you haven’t guessed already, the first thing I checked was if it had the signature tool — and it did. What a moment of relief it was! I only wish iOS imported my saved signatures from the Mac (so much for the bragged ecosystem), but creating a new one should be just as easy. After all, a Mac trackpad and a phone touchscreen are both just capacitive glass slabs.
My biggest relief comes from the fact that I can now skim PDFs and sign them on my phone without switching devices.
My biggest relief comes from the fact that I can now skim PDFs and sign them on my phone without switching devices. Normally, I’d have to grab my Mac, re-download the file from email or WhatsApp, and sign it there. None of that is required anymore.
As a bonus, Preview on iOS also has a built-in document scanner, something that previously meant jumping to the Notes app. It’s already turning out to be an everyday workhorse for me.
Pixels get by with the bare minimum
Naturally, the next thing I did was to compare this with what my Pixel offers, and let’s just say I wasn’t nearly as pleased. On my Pixel 10, opening a PDF with the default viewer gets me a barebones markup tool that looks like it hasn’t been updated in a decade.
Sure, you can highlight text or scribble something in your own handwriting — and yes, Google deserves credit for how well it handles natural swipes and curves drawn with your finger (look at the last screenshot above). But do I really want to recreate my signature from scratch every time I need to sign a document? Absolutely not.
It’s 2025 and Android’s native PDF viewer still can’t fill forms without requiring you to dig through the Play Store to find an app that does.
It would be far more practical if I could just store different versions of my signatures once and drop them into documents in seconds. If that wasn’t enough, Google’s alternative also lacks any kind of form-filling options. Come on, it’s 2025, and Android’s native PDF viewer still can’t fill forms without requiring you to dig through the Play Store to find an app that does? That’s just embarrassing.
Your Android alternatives
We’ve all at least once reached that point where Adobe Acrobat Reader’s restrictions bug you enough to look for solid alternatives. Many people settle for some random online tool in the moment, but I dug deeper for a more permanent fix. And that’s how I discovered this gem of an app called PDFGear.
It’s surprisingly popular, but I hadn’t heard of it until recently, and now I beat myself up for not switching earlier. It’s free, ad-free, and stacked with features. It has signature support, file conversion to and from PDF, page editing, fillable text boxes, and even the option to remove passwords from PDFs. Basically, everything you’d want a PDF editor to do.
PDFGear is free, ad-free, and stacked with features. I beat myself up for not switching earlier.
And yes, it’s on Android too. With a little setup to make it your default PDF app, it’s easily the best PDF experience you’ll get today on Android, probably much better than what Preview brings to iOS.
But here’s why I keep insisting on a better native PDF viewer and editor on Android: most people don’t fiddle with default apps, let alone hunt down a third-party one unless they actually know what they’re missing out on. If Google really wants to look past the flashy AI tricks on Pixels and polish the essentials, it should take a cue from Apple’s Preview on iOS. Better yet, it could one-up Apple by learning a trick or two from PDFGear. What’s stopping it?
After all, Google already copied Apple’s Journal app for the Pixel 10. So why not borrow a page here, too? I’d like to see Google eventually deliver its own Preview alternative for Android — one that won’t stay locked to Pixels.
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