The PDF viewer in Files by Google is about to get much more powerful (APK teardown)

Despite all their complexity and faults, PDFs are still something of a modern miracle, letting us share digital documents as easy as we’d hand someone a paper. But the tools we use to access them are not created equally, and even though PDF files may be practically universal, reader and editor apps vary wildly in their feature sets. Right now we’re looking at what Google’s been up to that could bring some extra functionality to the PDF viewer built into the Files by Google app.

Files by Google probably isn’t the app you immediately think of when needing to work with PDF documents on Android. But in a pinch, the file manager makes it easy to pull up any PDF you’ve downloaded for a quick look. On most of our phones, though, there’s a bit of a trick going on here, and if you’ve also got Drive installed, Files will tap it on the shoulder for a little assistance with displaying PDFs. By leaning on Drive’s PDF viewer, Files by Google is able to offer features like zooming, text selection, and even search.

But right now, Files by Google can’t do any of that on its own. On a device without Drive (for whatever reason), the app offers very, very limited PDF support — you can view documents, whole page by whole page, and that’s about it.

Looking at the new Files by Google 1.4955.677425801.0-release beta release, we’re able to activate some new features for the app’s internal PDF viewer. Those include zoom, text selection, and search, as well as the ability to open even password-protected PDFs.

Notably, these new features only seem to work when running the app on Android 15 systems, and we were not able to trigger them on Android 14. There’s probably a good reason for that, though, as Android 15 delivers upgrades to the platform’s PdfRenderer APIs that deliver just the sort of features we’re seeing here. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing other apps similarly getting a PDF upgrade as Android 15 spreads.