Adobe plans to finally launch a full version of its popular photo editing app Photoshop for the iPad.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Adobe is currently going through a multi-year strategy-shift which involves transitioning its desktop apps to a cross-platform architecture. This will allow the firm to make full-versions of its desktop apps available across mobile devices, without compromising the desktop experience.
Photoshop will be the first app to get a full version on the iPad, followed by Illustrator. Adobe is currently developing a full version of Photoshop on the iPad, and the company plans to introduce it at its MAX conference in October. A public release won’t happen until 2019, though.
Adobe appears to have confirmed the rumour, too. Scott Belsky, chief of Creative Cloud at Adobe, told Bloomberg that the company is working on a new cross-platform version of Photoshop, but declined to specify the timing of their launches.
“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” Belsky said. “There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”
Adobe has released multiple Photoshop-branded apps for the iPad in the past, starting with a version that appeared only months after the iPad’s 2010 debut. But all of the apps have been stripped down for mobile devices, with limited features, and none has strongly resembled the full Mac and PC version of Photoshop.
One issue will likely be the numerous architectures and systems that underpin Adobe’s key pieces of its Creative Cloud. Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator may need ground-up re-writes to work better with both each other and multiple devices in the future. When completed, however, people who pay for Creative Cloud will be able to seamlessly switch between devices — including iPads — when working on projects.
It’ll likely be a free download, but will no doubt require a Creative Cloud subscription to access its full feature set when it finally releases to the public.
