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boilermaker73
Inspiring
June 6, 2021
Question

Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mobile Leaves Much To Be Desired

  • June 6, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 487 views

As an Adobe Acrobat PDF Design Forms Developer of interactive PDF forms for well over twenty years, given the number of negative comments posted on the Adobe Reader Mobile forum regarding what many believe to be confusing and deceitful advertising on the part of Adobe regarding the list of features allegedly provided by its PDF Reader for mobile devices, I must admit Adobe appears to have failed miserably in its ability to provide a decent PDF Reader for other than desktop/laptop computers. Truth be told, Adobe's marketing efforts appear to be more concerned with securing paid subscriptions to its Acrobat DC version. In doing so, I believe Adobe Corporate has missed the boat in that they have yet to develop a PDF Reader for mobile devices equivalent to Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader for desktop/laptop computers. This in turn has resulted in all kinds of web forms and mobile apps like Device Magic whose marketing efforts would have the average computer user believe that their mobile form apps are the be all end all solution to ditching paperless forms once and for all. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. I say this since the majority of organizations (government included) in the public and private sectors have done a poor job at best creating fillable, interactive PDF forms that fail miserably in implementing the most basic properties and methods Adobe Acrobat PDF forms have to offer. In reality, whether it's the government, a global pharmaceutical company, healthcare facility, or nationally recognized insurance company, etc., the majority of PDF forms posted online are either non-interactive static PDF forms that need to be printed and filled in by hand or very basic interactive PDF forms by design that often exhibit improperly formatted form fields, i.e., checkboxes, form field formatting omissions, etc., leaving much to be desired. This being the case, those capable of creating interactive PDF forms containing all the bells and whistles required to facilitate completion of an interactive PDF form are limited to creating forms expressly designed for use on desktop/laptop computers since the Free Adobe Reader fails to support the same Acrobat properties/methods on mobile devices. While this may be attributed in part to the lack of a file system on Android and Apple mobile devices, I still believe it's a poor excuse for failing to come up with an equivalent PDF Reader for mobile devices to date given how fast phone technology has evolved over the past 10 years. What say you?

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1 reply

Participant
June 6, 2021

Well  said and  most  necessary. Wasted  many hours before I discovered this flaw. Shame on you Adobe!

ipad user