Video editing has never been Android’s strong suit. While Apple has long offered iMovie for iPhone and iPad, Google has never had a comparable offering. Adobe is now stepping up to fill this feature gap with a proper version of Premiere. The app is now available in the Play Store for almost all Android devices, and it’s free (mostly).
Android’s version of Premiere doesn’t offer all the features you’d get in the desktop application, but it’s a big step up from the soon-to-be-retired Premiere Rush app. You can import as many video tracks as you want, trim them, split them, add effects, and export videos in up to 4K resolution. It can even extract audio from clips, reduce background noise, and add voiceovers. The app emphasizes the YouTube Short format, even defaulting your video outputs to portrait 16:9, but you can change that to something more traditional.
On a standard smartphone, the app splits the screen with the timeline at the bottom and preview up top. Adobe says that Premiere is optimized for multiple form factors. If you have a foldable phone, the UI adjusts to give you more breathing room, placing the timeline to the right of the video. That makes sense as the default, as Premiere wants you to make YouTube Shorts, but if you’re working with something wider, there’s a layout toggle that puts the widescreen video above the expanded timeline. The split is also adjustable if you want to make your video or timeline larger.
I tested Premiere by importing multiple high-bitrate 4K clips, and it didn’t choke. However, processing newly added video tracks can take a minute. Exporting is also not instant, but it’s faster than I expected on a Pixel, which isn’t exactly known for extreme performance. A three-minute 4K60 video in high-quality mode took about three minutes. The app is designed to work on any Android device with at least 5GB of RAM.
There are a good number of options in the editing interface—unless you’re a pro or enthusiast video editor, this app should be more than powerful enough. Adobe also says that Premiere (and the rest of its mobile app portfolio) is optimized for Googlebook laptops. If you need more, there’s always the full desktop version of Premiere. Of course, that won’t be an option on Googlebooks.
Premiere for Android is free, and you don’t even need a subscription or Creative Cloud account unless you care about generative AI tools. The new Premiere app has image-to-video and text-to-video, with options for Adobe’s “commercial safe” Firefly model as well as Google Veo, Google Omni, Luma Ray, and Kling models.
You can generate some clips for free in Premiere, which comes with 250 monthly AI credits. That’s enough for a few Veo Fast clips (80 credits each) or a single Firefly video. For $70 per year or $8 per month, you get 1,200 monthly AI credits in the Premiere mobile app. If that’s not your thing, you can just enjoy the free, vastly improved video editing experience on Android. Apple devices got this app last year, but “better late than never” has always been the Android app motto.
Ryan WhitwamSenior Technology Reporter
Ryan WhitwamSenior Technology Reporter
Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.
