Adobe has officially launched its first dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) smartphone application, Firefly, now available for both iOS and Android devices. This strategic move aims to capitalize on the increasing trend of sharing AI-generated images and videos across social media platforms, positioning Adobe at the forefront of mobile AI content creation. The Firefly mobile app provides creators, from professionals to casual users, with powerful AI-driven tools to generate, edit, and iterate on images and videos directly from their phones.

The Firefly app is built on a robust and expansive AI model ecosystem, integrating Adobe's own in-house models with a wide array of third-party generative AI models. Users can access models from industry giants such as OpenAI and Google, alongside new partners like Ideogram, Luma AI, Pika, and Runway. This extensive integration makes Firefly a pioneering creative platform that offers an unparalleled choice of generative styles, aesthetics, and specific formats or resolutions, catering to diverse creative needs. The recently added models include Flux.1 Kontext by Black Forest Labs, Ideogram 3.0, Ray2 by Luma AI, Pika 2.2 text-to-video, Gen-4 Image by Runway, and Google’s Imagen 4 and Veo 3, in addition to OpenAI’s GPT Image.

Key features of the Firefly mobile app include Text-to-Image, Text-to-Video, and Image-to-Video capabilities. Notably, Adobe states it is the first company to bring text-to-video tools to mobile, allowing users to generate video clips up to 7 seconds in duration and in up to 1080p resolution. Complementing these generation tools are powerful editing features like Generative Fill, Generative Expand (for extending image sizes with AI-generated backgrounds), and Generative Remove (for adding or removing elements from visuals). The app also offers experimental features like "Scene to Image" for 3D scene generation, currently in beta.

A core strength of the Firefly mobile app lies in its seamless synchronization with Adobe's broader Creative Cloud suite. This integration allows users to maintain project continuity, effortlessly transitioning workflows from their mobile devices to desktop applications such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Lightroom. This ensures that assets developed on mobile can be seamlessly continued and refined on more powerful desktop platforms. Furthermore, Adobe has introduced Firefly Boards, now in public beta, an AI-first moodboarding platform designed to transform ideation and team collaboration. This feature enables creative teams to work on hundreds of ideas simultaneously, interact with various media types, and modify assets using conversational text prompts and AI-powered tools from both Adobe and its partners.

Adobe's approach to AI also emphasizes transparency and creator rights. The company attaches Content Credentials to all AI-generated content produced with Firefly. These credentials visibly specify the provenance of creative assets, detailing whether Adobe's own model or a partner's model was used in the generation process. This commitment to using legally sourced training material for its AI models and offering protection against copyright claims serves as a significant differentiator, resonating strongly with consumers and professionals alike.

For access, the Firefly mobile app offers subscribers unlimited basic image generation. However, access to Adobe's premium models and those from its partners requires an additional cost. The subscription model aligns with the web versions of Firefly, starting at $10 per month, or ₹499 per month / ₹4,999 per year in India for 750 monthly credits and 100GB of storage. Paid subscriptions for Firefly have nearly doubled in the last quarter, indicating strong user adoption and demand.

The launch of the Firefly app arrives amidst a broader industry shift where AI usage is increasingly moving to smartphones, prompting AI companies to enhance their mobile capabilities. Competitors like OpenAI, with its ChatGPT integration within WhatsApp, and Google, with updates to its Gemini app, are also vying for dominance in the mobile AI space. Despite this competitive landscape, Adobe reports significant growth, with over 24 billion assets produced globally using Firefly's generative AI models and a 30 percent quarter-on-quarter increase in Firefly usage. Ely Greenfield, Adobe's Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for digital media, highlighted Adobe's goal with Firefly: to provide creators with the most comprehensive destination on web and mobile to access the best generative models across the industry, all within a single, integrated experience from ideation through generation and editing.