Obsidian adds PDF export to its Android app

Export a note as a PDF from a phone

Obsidian now exports notes as PDFs on Android. Dynalist Inc., the developer, lists the feature first in the mobile changelog for Obsidian 1.15. It says notes can now be exported to PDF on both iOS and Android.

On a normal day that covers jobs like sending meeting notes to someone who doesn't use Obsidian, or turning a reading list into a file someone can print. Until now, getting a tidy document out of the phone app meant syncing the vault to a computer or installing a community plugin.

The changes come in version 1.15.0. The developer's Play Store notes describe the release as including every feature and fix up to Obsidian Desktop 1.15.0. The changelog dates the public mobile release to 2 November 2026.

Plugin authors had been filling the gap

Community developers had built their own workarounds while the official app went without the feature. One of them, the Mobile Export plugin, posted a notice on its GitHub page saying the plugin was built to make PDF export possible on phones where Obsidian did not offer it natively.

The same notice says people who only need basic PDF export may no longer need the plugin once the built-in option is available. It also says extras such as HTML export could still be useful, depending on how Obsidian's own version works.

Obsidian's public roadmap now lists mobile PDF export as launched in 1.15, under November 2026.

Vault management gets a redesign

The Android release also changes how vaults are handled. According to the developer, the Manage vaults screen now matches the design of the welcome screens, and new Obsidian Sync vaults can be created from it.

There is a small fix for anyone who switches vaults often. The Android back button now takes users back one screen in Manage vaults. Before, it closed the app.

The developer lists several more fixes. On Android, the editor no longer jumps back to the cursor when the keyboard or status bar changes size. The last community plugins and themes in search results are no longer hidden behind the keyboard. The comment button, which had gone missing from the default editor toolbar, is back.

Bases, Obsidian's database-style views of notes, have also changed on phones. Filters now sit in the Display menu as cards that can be dragged into a new order, and the number of results appears in the search bar.

Faster diagrams and accent-blind search

The mobile release includes the desktop 1.15 changes. The headline item there is Pele, a new library Obsidian uses to draw Mermaid diagrams and charts. The developer says diagrams now appear faster, take the colours and fonts of the user's theme, and can be zoomed and panned when scaled down.

In a post on X announcing 1.15, Obsidian said Pele renders diagrams "up to 500 times faster". The same post listed mobile PDF export among the release highlights, along with voice capture and transcription on iOS.

Five weeks of releases

The PDF feature is the latest in a run of releases this autumn. On 5 October, Obsidian made desktop version 1.14 public. That update could open individual Markdown files from outside a vault, and it added a kanban view for Bases and highlight colours.

On 22 October, Obsidian 1.15.0 went to early access for Catalyst members, the supporters who get builds before everyone else. On 27 October the developer updated Publish, its paid website service, with the same highlight colours and Pele-rendered diagrams.

The public 1.15 releases for desktop and mobile followed on 2 November. A day later, on 3 November, 1.15.1 went to early access on both platforms. The developer's desktop notes for that build cover faster search results, a workspace that appears straight away at startup, and quicker rendering in Reading mode.

Notes kept as plain text files

Obsidian is a note-taking app that works on a local folder of plain text Markdown files, which it calls a vault. Because the notes are ordinary files, other apps and sync tools can read them.

The Android app offers a customisable toolbar, a graph view showing how notes link to each other, and sharing to and from other apps. It also supports community plugins and themes, plus sidebar pinning on tablets.

Syncing between devices is optional. Obsidian Sync is the developer's own service. In a reply to a Play Store review, the developer said there are "dozens of free options" for syncing between devices and pointed users to its documentation.