Adobe Acrobat Reader is a must-have for working with PDF files. Its clever AI summaries cut straight to the point of even the longest documents, and it comes with tons of tools that make completing forms and editing, merging and converting PDFs a breeze.

What we love: With so many useful features on offer here, it’s hard to pick a favourite. Saving web pages as PDFs, though, is particularly handy – especially combined with the tools for editing, annotating, searching inside and sharing or exporting PDFs. That makes it a great research tool for school, university and business use.

Quick tip: You can make the app even more useful if you also install Adobe Scan, which enables you to scan documents, receipts and other printed items, or open existing images from your Photos. You can then save them as PDFs for organising, using and editing in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Meet the creator: Founded in 1982, Adobe is known for its creative apps Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere, which are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of apps. Co-founder John Warnock invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) as an easy and effective way to share high-quality documents digitally and Adobe launched it in 1993.