Apple iOS 26 Preview App: Hidden Features iPhone Users Must Explore

Apple’s iOS 26 update has come with major changes for iPhone users, one of the most remarkable being the addition of the Preview app, which was exclusively available on the Mac. The app is not just a file viewer but also enables users to manage, annotate, and convert PDF and image files right from their devices.

The Preview app, which is now on iPhone and iPad running iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, goes beyond the basic functions of the Apple Files app. The users can open their PDFs and images with Preview from where they are and then do things like signing, annotating, erasing, and setting password protection on it. Besides that, the app allows the users to scan documents directly to PDF format and also edit multi-page documents with options to rotate, crop, or rearrange pages.

It is easy to get to Preview: users can either look for it in the App Library or they can simply click on a corresponding file in the Files app. The files that are opened can be viewed, edited, or annotated. The interface is equipped with a variety of annotation tools and it allows to add text, highlight, and insert signature, thus it is very much a versatile option for casual as well as professional use.

The Files app is meant for basic file organization and quick previews while Preview is more powerful and suitable for advanced editing. Unlike Files, Preview is equipped with background removal in images and has superior export options including file format conversions like HEIC to JPEG or PNG. Besides, users can also reduce the size of their large files and change the resolution before exporting to iCloud or local folders, thus, their workflow would be less interrupted between Apple devices.

The Preview app for iPad gains even more value with the support for Apple Pencil, which gives the user better control for marking up and giving comments on lengthy PDF documents. The app on the iPhone is designed for the small screen, and the user-friendly layout of recent files access and document navigation in grid or list view makes it a perfect fit.

In spite of its benefits, the release of Preview as a new application has created confusion among iOS 26 users who think it is not justified to have a separate app when the Files app is able to perform similar functions. A good number of users find that Preview has more overlap with Files’ organizational tools, even though it is the latter that has stronger attributes when it comes to alteration of documents, conversion of files, and annotation. Some users may opt to get rid of the Preview app if its additional features do not match their needs and they can settle for Files for basic document management.