Adobe Lightroom Mobile is now free on all compatible mobile devices. The company just announced the Android version will now work without a subscription, joining a similar change made for iOS back in October.
Previously, you needed a to pay a monthly fee forAdobe Creative Cloud – starting at $9.99 – in order to access the app. That gave you full use of the desktop version of Lightroom and Photoshop as well, but not everyone needs those.
While professional photographers might not mind paying the fee (they’ll need to for the desktop apps anyway), that’s a very small percentage of smartphone users.
Chances are very few people who didn’t own or care about the desktop version were willing to pull out their credit cards for Lightroom Mobile, even with a free trial. After all, there are already too many great imaging, like VSCO and Snapseed. Even Instagram has become a powerful editor in its own right.
Now Lightroom Mobile is ‘just’ another photo app – albeit perhaps the most powerful one around – and many more people will be likely to use it because of it.
The free copy has almost all the features you previously got with a subscription, except for the cloud-specific ones. You can’t sync photos and edits with the desktop version, for example, but that doesn’t matter if you never used it in the first place, and you can still pony up for the cloud features if you need them.
➤ Lightroom Mobile for Android 1.4 now available and free! [Adobe via The Verge]
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