Adobe Premiere Is Now Available on the iPhone, but Has Some Privacy Concerns

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You once needed a decent computer and expensive software in order to seriously edit video. No longer. These days, you can download a free app on any smartphone, and instantly have the tools necessary to put together a legitimate video, especially for social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

It would have been difficult to imagine something like Adobe Premiere working properly on a smartphone in the heyday of desktop video editing, but these days, it's a reality. Perhaps that's why Adobe is changing with the times. Following its Photoshop mobile app rollout earlier this year, Adobe released an official version of Premiere for iPhone on Tuesday. The company had announced the news at the beginning of the month, and confirmed an Android version is in the works.

Premiere for iPhone

According to Adobe, if you're familiar with Premiere, you'll be familiar with its mobile adaptation. There's the same multi-track timeline, with "vibrant colors and dynamic audio waveforms," that supports frame-by-frame trimming, layering, and tuning. There are automatic captions, subtitles, layers for video, audio, text, and 4K HDR support.

Unlike the current desktop version of Premiere, which requires a subscription, the mobile version of Premiere is free to download and use. Adobe says that only users who need extra storage or want to use the app's AI features need to pay—though it doesn't appear that Adobe has released pricing information yet. To that point, Adobe is pushing some of its AI features here, including Generative Sound Effects, which combines your voice with text prompts to produce a stylized voice over. There's also Enhance Speech, which uses AI in an attempt to improve the quality of your voice recordings.

You can also use Adobe Firefly, the company's AI content generator, to generate video, image, and audio assets. Adobe says Firefly content is safe for commercial use, so you should have no issue including generations in your content. In addition, you can tap into any of the assets in the Adobe Stock library, which includes music, sound effects, photos, graphics, and videos.

While it seems like the major editing tools you'd expect from the full Premiere app are here, there's no doubt this experience was designed for mobile—and the platforms that mobile video editors tend to produce for. Adobe says you can export your projects instantly to platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram—as well as Premiere Pro, if you have it—in case you'd like to finish the video in these apps. If you complete the video in Premiere, you can publish the finished product directly to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram. Videos can also automatically resize depending on the platform you're sending it to.

Will Premiere on mobile be worth it?

There are a lot of video editing apps out there specifically designed for mobile use. That's not to say Premiere won't be a good editing option: Adobe's editor is popular for a reason, and if they've properly designed it to work on an iPhone or Android, it could be a serious threat to existing options like CapCut and LumaFusion. In fact, the company has already dipped its toe into mobile editors before, with Adobe Premiere Rush. That app is much more basic than the version of Premiere Adobe is announcing today.

Many users will likely enjoy trying out the app free of charge, and I know most (if not all) will have no problem shirking Adobe's expensive subscriptions. However, as the saying goes, if a product is free, you are the product. According to Premiere's App Privacy report in the App Store, there's a lot of data Adobe collects from you when using this app, including:

• Purchases

• Contact Info

• User Content

• Identifiers

• Usage Data

• Location (not linked to you)

• Diagnostics (not linked to you)

This is actually an improvement from the initial announcement. Back then, Search History and "Other Data" were part of the data collection list, as they are with Adobe Premiere Rush. More concerningly, these data points, along with Location data, were linked to your identity. If Adobe had kept the privacy policies the same, the company would know where you were when editing your videos. At some point in the past month, that changed.

But there's no denying there are some privacy trade-offs here. Sure, it's great to have a full-fledged video editor on your iPhone, but will it be worth the privacy invasion? It's not the only one of Adobe's apps to collect this much data, nor does Adobe have the best track record when it comes to user privacy, but still, it's worth a consideration before you use it. LumaFusion, for example, does not collect any data that is linked to your identity. The data it does collect—identifiers, diagnostics, and usage data—is anonymized, so it can't be traced back to you, though the app does cost $30. While Premiere is not alone in its data collection policies, understand that any purchases, contacts, content, or data generated by your usage can be collected by Adobe and tied to you.

If Premiere for mobile is as capable an editor as Premiere Pro, I imagine this could make for a great experience, especially for those already in the Adobe ecosystem. For others, there may be some compromises to weigh.

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