Adobe is reportedly planning to bring its flagship Photoshop app to the iPad. The company is currently going through a multi-year strategy-shift which involves transitioning its desktop apps to a cross-platform architecture. This will allow the firm to make full-version of its desktop apps available across mobile devices, without compromising the desktop experience.

Photoshop will be the first app to get a full version on the iPad, followed by Illustrator. Adobe is currently developing a full version of Photoshop on the iPad, and the company plans to introduce it at its MAX conference in October. A public release won’t happen until 2019, though.

“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible. There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era,” said Adobe’s chief product officer of Creative Cloud.

Adobe’s next-gen applications will also bring the ability to make edits on the fly. Creatives apparently want to be able to make edits on the fly on Adobe applications across all their machines, and being able to sync their projects across all their devices will be quite helpful.

The firm won’t completely replace the existing Photoshop app on the desktop with the “modern” version. These modern apps will have mobile-friendly interfaces and will be delivered alongside the existing desktop versions of Photoshop at first. Once they mature and are competent of replacing Photoshop on the desktop, Adobe could end-up replacing the full desktop Photoshop app with the modern, cross-platform version.

For Apple, Adobe launching a full version of Photoshop on the iPad is a huge breakthrough. For years, Microsoft’s Surface devices — especially the Surface Pro — undercut iPads like the iPad Pro by being able to run full versions of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. With the launch of Photoshop on iPad, that could soon change, and Apple’s iPad could be the one with more powerful Creative Cloud apps in a few years time.

Tagged with Adobe, Adobe CC, Creative Cloud, iPad, Photoshop