With iOS 26, Apple introduced a new app on iPhone and iPad: Preview. This app has been on the Mac for a long time, and as the name suggests, it serves as a system-wide file preview of sorts, that way you don’t need an app to view every file.
While this app may be intuitive on the iPad, I’ve found it rather cumbersome on the iPhone. Luckily, there’s a rather simple fix for it.
Preview on iPhone is a rather interesting concept. To me, at least, it feels redundant – largely due to the fact that Files already handled viewing PDFs, images, and the like – all in one app. However, I can certainly see the argument for having it on iPad. After all, with iPadOS 26, you can now have folders pinned to your dock, so I can definitely understand people wanting to just view files quickly without needing to open a whole app.
That use case simply doesn’t exist on iPhone, though. When I’m opening a file on iPhone, I’m generally already in the Files app. Prior to iOS 26, if you viewed a file in the Files app, it’d handle it then and there. Now, it bounces you out to the Preview app, which can be quite annoying.
Lets say you have a folder of photos downloaded on your iPhone. With Files, you used to be able to just swipe through them. With Preview, you have to continually go back and forth between the two. It’s incredibly cumbersome. Granted, if you chose to long press on a file and hit “Quick Look”, it would stay within the Files app, rather than bouncing you out to Preview. Still, you’d need to remember to do that every single time.
Luckily, there’s a quick fix for this: you can just delete Preview.
Yep, if you delete Preview – the Files app reverts to its iOS 18-era functionality, and it’ll just open files within the Files app, with no hoops to jump through. As someone who only needs the bare essentials, I genuinely appreciate the Files app on my iPhone.
If you ever want Preview back, you can always re-install it from the App Store whenever you want.
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