I’ll be honest… when the rumors started circulating that iPad (and iPhone) were getting the Preview app from macOS, I didn’t really see what the big deal was. I’ve never used Preview for much more than viewing PDFs and occasionally annotating them….and doesn’t Quick Look in the Files app already do most of that anyway? After spending a little time with the new app, I think I (mostly) get it.

Launch Experience

The Preview app opens to the rich Document Picker that was introduced in iPadOS 18. This means the app is deeply integrated with the Files app. You’re shown a filtered view of the files on your device that Preview can open, which is primarily PDFs and standard image formats.

From here, you have quick actions that let you:

• Create a new empty image
• Create an image from the contents of your clipboard
• Launch the document scanner
• Access sorting and selection options

As a good iPadOS citizen, Preview support multiple windows, allowing you to have multiple PDFs or images open at once.

General Interface

The Preview UI on macOS has always been pretty minimal, and the same approach was followed here. Of course, the interface has been adapted to be more touch friendly, and embrace the new Liquid Glass UI.

Preview includes the familiar sidebar from the Mac version, letting you view all the pages in a multi-page PDF. Long-pressing or right-clicking on individual pages gives you options to edit the selected page or add/remove content from the document.

Like any good document-based iPadOS app, Preview features a customizable toolbar. If you right-click (long-pressing doesn’t seem to be working in Developer Beta 1) on the toolbar itself, you’ll get access to a variety of toolbar actions you can switch out.

Key Features

• Markup and Annotation with Apple Pencil – PDFs can be marked up using the standard Apple Pencil tool palette.
• Form Filling – Preview will automatically recognize PDFs with form fields and let you fill them in manually or use Autofill.
• Saved Signatures – You can save multiple written signatures to apply to forms.
• Selection and Rotation Controls – Easily select, rotate, or delete elements within supported files.
  

There a couple of other interesting features I wanted to mention:

Image Background Removal

Preview offers a quick way to remove the background from an image. Apparently, this has been in the Mac version for a while, and I had no idea.

Visual Intelligence

There’s an option labeled Visual Intelligence that doesn’t appear to be working yet in Developer Beta 1. This is something I’ve been hoping would come to iPad, so hopefully it’s not just a leftover placeholder. Analyzing an image with Visual Intelligence might make more sense on iPad than via the rear camera on iPhone, but either way, I think that’s a feature that should be implemented.

Conclusion

If nothing else, having the Preview app on iPad better surfaces some of the PDF handling capabilities that were already in iPadOS, while also bringing over useful features from the Mac, like saved signatures and background removal. Having this app is a win for the platform.