Native PDF support is coming to Chrome for Android, and you can try it now
 

• Google Chrome for Android will soon finally open PDF files on its own without the need for a third-party app.
• You can search through PDFs or annotate them before saving them to Google Drive.
• This functionality is currently locked behind a flag but will be available on Android 12 and later when it launches.

A lot of online documents are saved as PDFs, which means it’s important that you install a good PDF reader app so you can open them. There are a lot of options out there, though, and some Android devices even come with more than one of them preinstalled, making things confusing for regular users. These apps were necessary because Android hasn’t had a good native PDF reader until recently.

Although Android finally added a native PDF reader with its latest release, it’s up to apps to utilize it. Files by Google was one of the first apps to adopt Android’s native PDF reader, and it’s looking like Google Chrome will be next. Back in February, Chrome expert Leopeva64 spotted a flag that allows the browser to open PDFs “inline,” i.e. without exiting the app, but it didn’t work at the time. X user Trischand notified us that the feature is now working, and we’ve confirmed this in our own testing.




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