Skip to main content
Noble Desktop/6 min read

Free Adobe Apps for Phone & Tablet

Adobe Apps for Mobile

Photoshop on iPad

Full-featured Photoshop — now genuinely competitive with desktop for core work.

Illustrator on iPad

Vector illustration with Apple Pencil support for drawing.

Fresco

Adobe's drawing and painting app for iPad and Windows.

Lightroom Mobile

Photo editing synced across desktop and mobile.

Express

Quick social graphics and video creation on any device.

Master Adobe at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Graphic Design Certificate teaches the Adobe Creative Cloud toolkit at the professional depth that carries across every device.

Discover a range of Adobe mobile apps designed to boost your creative productivity, from the Adobe Creative Cloud mobile app that allows easy access to Adobe files and minor image edits, to Adobe Fresco that offers a realistic drawing and painting experience. Learn about Lightroom for mobile's photo editing capabilities, Photoshop Camera's intelligent filter application, Photoshop Express's mobile-friendly image manipulation, Premiere Rush's video editing suite, Spark's speedy graphics and video creation, and Adobe XD's real-time design previews on your mobile device.

Creative Cloud

The Adobe Creative Cloud mobile app is a convenient way to access all of your Adobe files, install Adobe fonts, and do minor edits to images when you’re not at your desktop computer.

With Home, Learn, Files, Fonts, and Apps tabs, there are many opportunities for you to stay connected to your Adobe products from your phone or tablet. You can take tutorials and learn new skills through Learn, and access & organize files in your Creative Cloud through Files.

The app has several features only available on the Apple iOS such as the ability to install Adobe fonts on your phone and the app’s Suggestions on the Home tab, which recommends edits and learning based on your use of Adobe Creative Cloud.

Fresco

Adobe Fresco was designed to provide a realistic drawing and painting experience on touch devices like your phone or iPad. It has the “world’s largest collection of vector and raster brushes'' alongside live brushes that feel as if you’re really painting.

Fresco replaced the Illustrator app, and it doesn’t disappoint. With features like hyper-realistic brushes that feel as if you’re painting on a canvas to masking options and the ability to work in full-screen mode, this app provides a place to be endlessly creative with painting and drawing— without the mess.

It also pairs exceptionally well with Photoshop for iPad, which allows you to easily enhance your paintings with tools from either app.

Lightroom for Mobile

Lightroom for mobile allows you to take, edit, and share photos. Specifically designed for phones, tablets, and Chromebooks, the app is built on Adobe Photoshop technology, which means you can make photos look professional straight from your mobile device.

Lightroom for mobile offers simple editing options and is primarily made for touching up photos rather than creating artwork like you would in Photoshop. It has 30+ preset filters, and you can adjust the color and clarity of your photos, as well as create vignettes.

The app is included with most Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions, although you do have the option to upgrade and get access to premium editing features.

Photoshop Camera

Adobe Photoshop Camera is a free mobile app that allows you to take beautiful photos and add the right filter to make them picture perfect. In fact, the app even suggests the best filters and lenses for the photo before you take it, and new ones are added every week.

It’s an “intelligent camera app” that suggests lenses it thinks you might like, and you can apply them before or after you take an image. If you don’t like it, you can easily change it—and save your favorites to use again later.

Additionally, because the app is intelligent, it can help you take better pictures such as selfies or nature photos. You have the ability to do some quick editing such as changing lighting and removing distortion right from the app, which is great for social media purposes.

Photoshop Express

Adobe Photoshop Express allows you to use powerful “intelligent” Photoshop features from the app to create the best images no matter where you want to share them. The app is free to download and comes with basic features, with the option to upgrade to Premium if you want to do more advanced editing tasks.

Some of the Photoshop tools you can use within the app are smart cutouts for removing objects you don’t want (or adding them to a different part of the photo), replacing eyes which allows you to alter images where someone’s eyes are closed, and even making fun stickers out of any object. There are also options to make collages and scrapbooks from your photos.

The app isn’t the “same” as Photoshop on desktop because it was designed specifically for use on mobile devices. On top of the editing you can do in the app, you can connect it to Dropbox, Google Photos, and even Facebook for easy sharing and saving.

Premiere Rush

Adobe Premiere Rush is Adobe’s mobile app for editing videos. You can film and edit videos right in the app with ease.

Convenient features include the ability to: enhance and color correct in a video, add transitions by clicking and dragging on the screen, adjust the pace and speed of the video, add and manipulate audio (including voiceovers), and share the correct sized video to all of your social channels.

Premiere Rush is included with full Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions, although you can purchase it on its own for $9.99 per month, too. If you’re still deciding, there is a ”starter” plan with a limited number of exports so you have the chance to determine if it’s the right app for you before you purchase.

Spark

Adobe Spark allows you to create beautiful branded graphics and short videos quickly and easily. With the ability to upload your brand colors, fonts, and even logos, you can make a big statement in no time on your website and social media.

One of the best features of the app is how many templates are available. Whether you’re creating a social media post or an image for your business or blog, you can choose a pre-made design, customize it, and share your image in the correct size no matter where it’s going. You can also create short videos using photos, icons, video clips, and even voiceovers with an already curated design to make a professional-quality video story.

The app is included in Adobe Creative Cloud plans, or you can purchase it on a separate subscription for $9.99. A 30-day free trial is available if you want to try it out before committing to a subscription.

XD

Adobe XD on mobile is a free companion app to the desktop program. It allows you to do a real-time preview of desktop designs on your phone or tablet.

This app works best when used in conjunction with the desktop app because when you connect your device to a computer via USB, you can edit your prototypes and/or designs on the desktop and see the changes on your mobile device in real-time. You can also load your XD documents onto your device if you save them as cloud documents on your desktop.

The real-time editing functionalities are available for Apple iOS on desktop and Windows and Android mobile devices using mac iOS.