Photoshop is finally available on the iPhone

It’s been one of the most popular Mac apps for ages and was released for the iPad over five years ago, but Photoshop has somehow never made it to the iPhone. Until now.

With more users editing images and creating digital art entirely on their phones these days, Adobe simply had to make a version of Photoshop optimized for our pocket screens. It is available today on iPhone, with an Android version expected later this year.

Adobe says it has built the app “from the ground up” with an interface that keeps the intensive layering and adjustments that are the core of the Photoshop experience while remaining useable on a small screen.

You’ll find a lot of the features you’re used to on the desktop or iPad: layering, compositing, blending, spot healing, tons of fonts and effects, powerful selection and masking tools, and even AI stuff like generative fill, generative expand, and Firefly image generation tools.

However, while Photoshop is a free app, the good stuff isn’t free. And you didn’t think Adobe was going to let you buy Photoshop somewhere, did you? Naturally, there is a subscription on offer. For $7.99 a month, you can subscribe to a new Mobile and Web plan ($69.99 annually) that gives you access to Photoshop on the web as well as premium features in the Photoshop iPhone and iPad apps. With the sub, you can save all your work to the cloud and instantly open it on another location or device.

What’s behind the paywall? The Firefly AI tools require a subscription, naturally, as does access to the full library of 20,000+ Adobe fonts. Some of the features that you might consider core to the modern Photoshop experience are only for subscribers, like Magic Wand, Object Select, Content-Aware fill, clone stamp, and some advanced blending modes.

Fortunately, if you already have a paid Photoshop plan, which gives you access to the iPad and web versions today, you will already have access to the premium features of the iPhone app. The new subscription is really only necessary for those who are coming into Photoshop for the first time from their mobile device, and don’t have or need desktop or iPad versions.