getting the old Acrobat Reader back on Android

Acrobat Reader is as far as I know the best PDF reader on an Android device. So every time an update was available, I gladly downloaded it from the market to check out the new features and it’s usually fancier layout.

After the update to Acrobat X however, I found out that they killed the most important feature to easily read PDF’s on a phone. From now on there is no way to have the text of a PDF reflow and resized on that small mobile’s screen. What. The. Fuck?

Without this it becomes extremely annoying to read any PDF, since none of them have been adjusted for reading on a tiny handheld phone’s screen. Reflow & being able to adjust the font size allowed me to use it as an e-book reader. Without that, it gives me instant RSI from constant pinching and scrolling left, right, up & down to be able to fit the text on-screen. And I don’t like RSI.

None of the other PDF Readers seem to have a text reflow feature, except BeamReader. Although this is damn good app, it’s only free for evaluation for 10 days. I didn’t feel like spending 7 Euro on something that I used to have for free, so I kept looking for another solution.

So how about getting the old version back of Acrobat Reader? That would fix it right? You can’t do that through the market unfortunately, but I did find a copy on a website called freewarelovers.com. I know this is something to be wary about, so take care if you’re following me down this path. Downloading apps from websites like this is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get. I did get the 9.0 version of Acrobat Reader from it though, and so far nothing funny happened and I have my text reflow back. Hurray!

Being able to restore/install older version of apps would be a nice feature. Not all updates are going to turn out as they should, or as you’d want them to on your phone. I’m wondering if you guys and girls have another way of dealing with this kind of thing too.

Photo by Miguel Michán, cc-licensed