PDF Viewer
After more than five years of providing the industry-leading PDF framework for companies such as Dropbox, Evernote, Box, IBM, and United Airlines, we’ve finally made our technology available to everyone with our new app, PDF Viewer, now available for iOS and Android.
Why Now after All These Years?
We’ve chewed on the idea of building our own app for more than two years now. We always knew we didn’t just want to build a sample app to showcase the framework, but we weren’t sure if we were ready to really commit to building a full-fledged PDF viewer and editor. About six months ago, we decided it was time to head down the path of building a serious app. Our existing customers already knew that delivering a truly delightful user experience is at the core of all our work. We knew everyone encounters PDFs. We also knew there were very few apps available that delivered the experience and level of detail that we’re known for, let alone for free. And that’s when we got to work on PDF Viewer.
Free End-User PDF Viewer App
Our goal is to build the best PDF viewer and editor on the market and make it affordable to everyone. Our primary business is the SDKs that power PDF Viewer on iOS, Android, and the web.
Our app will help us raise the bar for everyone as to what a great PDF viewing and editing experience is, which will in turn help us sell our SDKs. With a higher standard expected for everyone, we’ll improve the ecosystem across both iOS and Android.
Furthermore, we built in a world-class feedback system and will collect crash reports from users that’ll help us better understand and correct issues, improve stability, and discover more edge case PDFs that don’t render properly. The PDF document format is old, and there are so many variations that it simply takes years to find most of the edge cases — we’ve been at this for more than six years now and we still see things that surprise us. The more users PDF Viewer will have, the better our SDKs will be.
But How Will You Make Money?
PSPDFKit is, and has been since the day we opened our doors, a 100 percent bootstrapped company. We’ve been fortunate enough over the past couple years to be in a position now where we can invest in our own app. While basic PDF functionality inside PDF Viewer will remain free, we have plans to launch premium subscription-based features and services next year, such as the ability to create digital signatures, page text editing, and collaborative annotating of documents in real time.
Thank You
The 1.0 release is just the beginning. We’re thrilled to finally ship, but we’re definitely not stopping here. We’d like to send a big thank you to the thousands of beta testers who helped us to deliver an outstanding product. There’s still some space left, however, and if you sign up for our newsletter or become a beta tester, you’ll be the first to hear about what we’ve been up to. We’re excited to read your feedback and hear about how you use PDF Viewer in your daily life.
