You can soon open downloads in your preferred apps on Chrome for Android

When you download a PDF (for example) on Chrome, you might have observed that it always opens within Chrome itself, on the Android app. Google is working on changing that.

A recent flag addition to Chrome Canary enables you to open PDFs (and downloads) in the user’s preferred app for the specific file, as reported earlier by @Leopeva64 on X.

If you’re interested in trying this out, you’ll need to open Chrome Canary and enter chrome://flags in the search bar. From there, look up “Open downloads…” and you should see the flag that says “Open downloads in preferred app.” Set that to “Enabled,” and relaunch the browser.

For example, I’ve opened a sample downloadable PDF, and it has been stored under the “Downloads” section, as you’d expect. Tapping on the download now opens my default PDF viewer (vivo Docs) on Canary. If you haven’t set a default viewer, it should prompt you with various options instead of opening it directly within Chrome.

Just to showcase the current behavior on the stable version, I’ve downloaded the same PDF there. The sample PDF opens directly within Google Chrome and doesn’t open my default PDF viewer. This is the behavior that an upcoming update will change. So, I can confirm that the flag is completely functional at the time of writing.

We don’t have a word on when the flag will make it to the stable version. Since it’s still in Canary, it should take at least a month or two. However, Google could decide to add it directly without tying it to a specific version of the browser, in which case you’ll get it earlier.

What’s also unclear is whether Google will add an option to open files directly from Chrome’s first-party viewer again. Those who are used to it might prefer it for PDFs opened from within Chrome.

In other Chrome news, Google has decided to call it quits on the recent Mica design they’ve been experimenting with. More on that here.

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