Add PDFs to any mobile app: A framework-by-framework guide

Adding PDF capabilities to a mobile app from scratch — rendering, text selection, annotations, form filling, digital signatures — takes months of engineering. Open source libraries cover some of it (usually viewing or generation), and a commercial SDK gives you the whole stack out of the box. If you go the SDK route, the question isn’t really which features — Nutrient ships the same core feature set on every platform — it’s which SDK matches the framework you already build in.

This guide answers that framework by framework: what each SDK supports, how to get started, and where to go deeper. If you’d rather compare from the product side first, see the mobile SDK overview.

Choose your framework

What every Nutrient mobile SDK includes

Across all five platforms, you get the same core feature set, so the capabilities don’t change when you switch frameworks:

• On-device PDF rendering with smooth scrolling and zoom
• 17 annotation types — highlights, notes, ink, stamps, shapes — with import and export
• Fillable PDF forms with data export
• Electronic and digital signatures
• A document editor to reorder, rotate, insert, and delete pages
• Full-text search
• An AI Assistant for document Q&A and summarization (requires a backend and an LLM provider)
• Offline operation for viewing, annotation, forms, and signing — no network required

The sections below focus on what’s distinctive about each platform’s integration and how to get your first PDF onscreen. Every SDK ships with sample apps and regular updates.

iOS PDF SDK

Nutrient’s iOS PDF SDK is built for Swift and Objective-C apps on iPhone and iPad. It integrates with both UIKit and SwiftUI, and it ships with a default UI you can extend or replace entirely.

Install via Swift Package Manager or CocoaPods, then present a document:

# Swift Package Manager
# Add https://github.com/PSPDFKit/PSPDFKit-SP to your Xcode project

import PSPDFKit
import PSPDFKitUI

let document = Document(url: documentURL)
let pdfController = PDFViewController(document: document)
// Wrap in a `UINavigationController` to show the built-in toolbar.
present(UINavigationController(rootViewController: pdfController), animated: true)

For a full setup walkthrough, see our blog on how to edit PDFs in an iOS application using a PDF library.

Android PDF SDK

Nutrient’s Android PDF SDK targets Kotlin and Java apps, with Jetpack Compose and XML layout support and a ready-to-use PdfActivity.

Add the dependency to your build.gradle, and then show a document:

dependencies {
    implementation("io.nutrient:nutrient:11.5.1")
}

val config = PdfActivityConfiguration.Builder(context).build()
PdfActivity.showDocument(context, documentUri, config)

For a complete guide, see our blog about how to build an Android PDF viewer.

React Native PDF SDK

Nutrient’s React Native PDF SDK shares PDF logic across iOS and Android from a single JavaScript codebase — with Expo compatibility — while native modules handle rendering on each platform for fully native performance:

npm install @nutrient-sdk/react-native
cd ios && pod install

import NutrientView from '@nutrient-sdk/react-native';

export default function App() {
  return (
    <NutrientView
      document="path/to/document.pdf"
      style={{ flex: 1 }}
    />
  );
}

For a full setup guide, see our blog on how to build a React Native PDF viewer.

Flutter PDF SDK

Nutrient’s Flutter PDF SDK is a single Dart package that renders natively on each platform and uniquely adds web alongside iOS and Android:

dependencies:
  nutrient_flutter: ^5.5.1

import 'package:nutrient_flutter/nutrient_flutter.dart';

await Nutrient.present('path/to/document.pdf');

For a full tutorial, see our blog on how to create and edit PDFs in Flutter.

.NET MAUI PDF SDK

Nutrient’s .NET MAUI PDF SDK is the widest-reaching of the five — one C# codebase that targets Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows, including desktop.

Declare the PDFView control in XAML:

<pspdfkit:PDFView x:Name="PDFView" />

Then load a document through its controller in the code-behind:

var config = PDFView.Controller.CreateViewerConfiguration();
await PDFView.Controller.LoadDocumentAsync("document.pdf", config);

For a complete guide, see our walkthrough on how to build a .NET MAUI PDF viewer.

Open source vs. a commercial SDK

Every platform has open source PDF options: Apple’s PDFKit on iOS; PdfRenderer and AndroidPdfViewer on Android; flutter_pdfview and pdf/printing on Flutter; react-native-pdf on React Native; QuestPDF and PDFsharp on .NET. They handle viewing or generation well and are a fine fit for read-only or simple use cases.

Where they stop is everything after viewing: annotation editing, form filling, electronic and digital signatures, redaction, and a configurable UI. Each platform guide linked above compares its open source options in detail. Nutrient fills that gap with the same editing and UI layer across every framework, plus commercial support.

Which Nutrient SDK should you use?

Choose an SDK based on your team’s stack and target platforms:

• Native iOS only — Use the iOS SDK. It delivers the best performance and deepest UIKit/SwiftUI integration.
• Native Android only — Use the Android SDK. It includes full Jetpack Compose support and a native Kotlin API.
• iOS and Android from one codebase (JavaScript team) — Use the React Native SDK. It shares logic across both platforms with native rendering under the hood.
• iOS, Android, and web from one codebase (Dart team) — Use the Flutter SDK. One package covers all three targets.
• iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows from one codebase (.NET team) — Use .NET MAUI SDK. It’s the best choice if you’re already in the .NET ecosystem.

Because every SDK ships the same core features, switching frameworks later doesn’t mean giving any of them up. For a side-by-side look at platform support and capabilities, see the mobile SDK overview.

Conclusion

Whichever framework you build in, there’s a Nutrient SDK that adds full PDF capabilities with a consistent feature set and production-ready defaults — a native iOS app, a cross-platform Flutter or React Native project, or a .NET MAUI app all start from the same place.

Browse the mobile SDK overview for the full picture, start a free trial to test any SDK, or contact Sales to discuss licensing.

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