Photoshop's getting a surprise free upgrade on iPhone – and Android's next

Photoshop has been around on iPhone and Android for a while, but in a lite, less detailed way than its apps on desktops and tablets – until now. As part of some anniversary celebrations, Adobe has confirmed that it's releasing a new Photoshop for iPhone, with an Android version coming down the line, too.

The new iPhone app should be available today and promises to include far more of the most useful and recognisable Photoshop tools that desktop users will recognise, including more robust object-selection tools, layering and more. Rather than just being a photo retouching app, it should let you make far deeper edits without having to break out a laptop.

One big headline inclusion is generative AI, with Adobe's implementation now quite established in Photoshop workflows for when an image is missing something or not quite the right shape for you. I'd say this looks more than a little like a response to the direction of travel on AI features recently.

After all, following in Google and Samsung's footsteps, Apple Intelligence has given iOS users ways to edit photos automatically without the need for any external apps, and its AI tools now let you erase annoyances from your images (albeit with sometimes mixed results). Photoshop's position as the default name, when you think of editing images, might therefore be under threat.

Still, Adobe is also pretty well known for having fees, at this point, and there is indeed a new plan to account for the new app. It's going to be labelled a Photoshop Mobile and Web plan, since the Photoshop web app is also getting similar upgrades, and will allow people to pay for a fuller version of the app experience, without graduating all the way to full-fat Photoshop desktop.

It'll cost $7.99/month or $69.99/annually, with international pricing to follow, which isn't a tiny amount, but is a little less than you'd pay for full Photoshop, making it a step on the path to a more expensive image editing existence. Unless, of course, you opt for subscription-free options like Affinity Photo, which doesn't charge you more than once.

That tie-up between web and mobile means that you should be able to move seamlessly between editing on one or the other, which sounds like a great feature in theory. We'll see how popular this version of Photoshop ends up being, but it definitely seems like a nice upgrade compared to Photoshop Express, the existing mobile experience, which is more watered-down.