March 24, 20266 min read

Best PDF Apps for Android in 2026 — Free and Paid Options

The best Android PDF apps for reading, editing, signing, and scanning. Covers Google Drive, Adobe Acrobat, Xodo, Foxit, and Microsoft Office.

android pdf apps google drive pdf reader document scanning

Android's PDF situation is weirdly fragmented. Some phones open PDFs in Google Drive. Some use a Samsung or Xiaomi built-in viewer. Some just download the file and leave you staring at it.

Here's what actually works well in 2026, tested on a Pixel 8 and a Samsung Galaxy S24.

What Android Does Out of the Box

Google Drive is preinstalled on every Android phone and serves as the default PDF viewer. It handles:

Reading PDFs (smooth, fast rendering)
Basic form filling (tap text fields, check boxes)
Printing via Google Cloud Print or local printers
Sharing via the Android share sheet

That's it. No annotation, no signing, no scanning (that moved to Google Drive's scan feature in late 2024), no page management. It's a reader, not a tool. Google Drive scanning: As of 2025, Google merged the old CamScanner-style scanning into Drive itself. Open Drive, tap the camera icon, scan. It does edge detection, auto-crop, and multi-page. Quality is acceptable. Not as refined as Apple Notes on iOS, but functional.

1. Adobe Acrobat Reader — Most Full-Featured Free Option

Price: Free (reader + comments), Premium $12.99/month | Size: ~230 MB

Adobe's Android app is the most capable free PDF reader available. The free tier gives you:

High-quality rendering with night mode and continuous scroll
Commenting: sticky notes, highlight, underline, strikethrough, drawing
Fill and sign: tap form fields, place signatures, add initials
Liquid Mode: AI-powered reflow for reading on small screens
Recent files and starred documents for quick access

Liquid Mode genuinely helps on phone screens. Dense two-column PDFs become single-column reflowed text. It doesn't work on every document (scanned images fail), but for text-based PDFs it's a game-changer on a 6-inch screen. Paid features ($12.99/month): text editing, page organization, export to Word/Excel, combine files. Expensive for individual use. The app is heavy. 230 MB installed, plus it caches files aggressively. Budget-conscious users on 32 GB devices should consider lighter alternatives.

2. Xodo — Best Free All-Rounder

Price: Free (most features), Premium $12/month | Size: ~85 MB

Xodo is the PDF app I recommend most on Android. It's lighter than Adobe, the annotation tools are excellent, and the free tier is more generous.

What you get free:

Full annotation suite: pens, highlighters, text boxes, stamps, shapes
Form filling with auto-detect
Digital signatures
Page management: reorder, rotate, delete (limited in free tier)
Bookmark and outline navigation
Dark mode that actually inverts PDF colors (not just the UI chrome)

The pen tool with pressure sensitivity works well with Samsung S Pen. Latency is minimal, palm rejection is good. For students and professionals who annotate PDFs on tablets, Xodo is the closest Android gets to the iPad + Apple Pencil experience. Collaboration: Xodo supports real-time annotation sharing. Two people can mark up the same PDF simultaneously. Niche feature, but useful for remote document review.

3. Foxit PDF Reader — Lightest Full-Featured Option

Price: Free (reader + basic edit), subscriptions for advanced | Size: ~60 MB

Foxit's Android app is impressively small. At 60 MB, it's a quarter the size of Adobe and still packs solid features:

Fast rendering even on mid-range hardware
Annotation and commenting tools
Form filling and signing
ConnectedPDF for document tracking
Text reflow mode for phone reading

Where Foxit really shines: performance on older or budget phones. If you're rocking a phone with 3 GB RAM and a Snapdragon 600-series chip, Foxit runs circles around Adobe. The app was designed with efficiency in mind. Missing: Page management is limited in the free tier. No combine/merge. The UI feels a bit dated compared to Xodo.

4. Microsoft 365 (Office) — Best for Office Users

Price: Free (basic), Microsoft 365 $6.99/month | Size: ~150 MB (combined suite)

Microsoft's combined Office app includes a solid PDF reader and scanner. If you already use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on Android, the PDF features come along for free.

The scanner is actually quite good. It includes:

Document, whiteboard, and business card scanning modes
Auto-edge detection and perspective correction
Multi-page scanning
Direct export to PDF, Word, or PowerPoint

The Word integration matters. Scan a document, tap "Open in Word," and you get an editable document. The conversion quality varies — simple text documents convert well, complex layouts don't — but the workflow is seamless.

5. Google Lens — Best Quick OCR on Android

Price: Free | Comes with: Google app

Not a PDF app, but worth mentioning. Google Lens can grab text from any image or camera view instantly. Point your camera at a printed page, select text, copy it. Works in 100+ languages with impressive accuracy.

For quick "I need the text from this document" tasks, Lens is faster than any scanning app. Long-press on any image in Google Photos to activate Lens OCR.

Web-Based Option for Everything Else

None of these apps merge PDFs well for free. None compress PDFs. For tasks like merging documents, compressing files, or converting formats, open Chrome and go to MyPDF. It works on any Android phone without installing anything.

I keep a home screen shortcut to MyPDF for exactly this reason. Tap, upload, done.

Quick Comparison

App	Size	Free Annotations	Free Signing	Scanner	Best For
Adobe Acrobat	230 MB	Yes	Yes	No	Feature depth
Xodo	85 MB	Yes	Yes	No	Best free all-rounder
Foxit	60 MB	Yes	Yes	No	Budget/older phones
Microsoft 365	150 MB	Basic	No	Yes	Office ecosystem
Google Lens	Built-in	No	No	OCR only	Quick text capture

Merge PDF — Combine PDFs on Android via Chrome
Compress PDF — Reduce file size for sharing
PDF to Word — Convert PDFs to editable documents
Image to PDF — Turn photos into PDF documents