Mobile & ChromeOS

Texifier, the best-known app that can typeset LaTeX on an iPad, is listed on the App Store at 61 MB. The TeX Live 2024 unpacked on the disk beside me is 8.7 GB. That factor of a hundred and forty says almost everything about running TeX on a phone or a tablet: the “real TeX” that fits on a device is necessarily a trimmed TeX. And there is a second fact that surprises people who check — neither Overleaf nor Cloud LaTeX ships an iOS app at all. Both are things you use in a browser. This page sets out what is actually possible today on ChromeOS, Android and iOS / iPadOS, with prices and last-updated dates attached.

For most people the honest answer is the browser

The reason is that putting an engine on the device buys you less than you expect. Typesetting is CPU- and disk-hungry work; on a phone or tablet it is slow and it is bulky. Anything with a browser, on the other hand, reaches a web editor backed by a complete TeX Live on a server. Overleaf and Cloud LaTeX both take you from editing through compiling to viewing the PDF without leaving the browser. Here the fact from the opening does its work: search the App Store and there is no Overleaf app and no Cloud LaTeX app (checked August 2026). The idea of “installing the app” does not apply. Open Safari or Chrome and you are already in the editor.

That said, there are real reasons to want the typesetting to happen on the device: a flight, an underground train, a field site with no signal — or simply not wanting to live inside a free tier's compile limit. The three sections that follow are a realistic map for people with that motive. To state the conclusion first: the Chromebook is comfortably ahead, Android works if you are willing to put in the effort, and iOS / iPadOS depends entirely on which app you buy — and on any of the three, when in doubt, going back to the browser is the right answer.

ChromeOS: the Linux development environment takes an ordinary TeX Live

Of the three, only the Chromebook lets you follow almost exactly the Linux procedure. That is because Google ships an official Linux development environment (developed under the name Crostini) that brings up a Debian environment inside the Chromebook. Enable it under Settings → Advanced → Developers → Linux development environment → Turn on. The first run spends a few minutes fetching and building the container; afterwards the “Terminal” app works. Underneath, a Debian container named penguin runs inside a VM named termina, and from there you have the same two choices as on Linux: install through Debian's apt, or through TUG's official install-tl.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

# Route 1: Debian packages. Convenient, but frozen at Debian's snapshot.
sudo apt install texlive-full        # several GB; texlive-latex-recommended is smaller

# Route 2: TUG's own net installer. Newest release, and you get tlmgr.
sudo apt install perl wget
wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz
tar xzf install-tl-unx.tar.gz
cd install-tl-*
sudo perl ./install-tl --no-interaction

The gap between the two routes is easiest to see as a number. Debian 13 (trixie) ships texlive-full at version 2024.20250309-1 — that is TeX Live 2024. The current release from TUG is TeX Live 2026, published on 1 March 2026. Convenience via apt therefore costs you two years of lag. If you want to update package by package with tlmgr, the official installer is the only choice. One trap as well: Crostini is sandboxed, so anything outside the “Linux files” folder — Google Drive, Downloads — is not visible by default. Share it from the Files app, or copy it into the container.

One more thing worth knowing now is Baguette. According to Google's own developer announcement, this is the next-generation architecture for Linux on ChromeOS: it removes the use of containers and runs the Linux environment as a virtualised guest directly. It becomes the default from M147 and can be controlled with the #containerless-crostini flag in chrome://flags. What should catch a TeX user's eye, though, is the deprecation list in the same announcement — UI-based Debian upgrades, graphical installation of .deb files, multi-container support, and, stated explicitly, IME support and graphics acceleration are no longer actively maintained. If you type Japanese or Chinese while writing, check your input method after the transition.

Android: a real TeX Live runs in Termux — but there is no texlive package

On Android, the Linux build of TeX Live runs almost unchanged inside the terminal app Termux. The pkg install texlive that older articles recommend, however, no longer works. Today's Termux carries just two relevant packages: texlive-bin, the executables themselves (version 1:2026.0, maintained by Henrik Grimler), and texlive-installer, a wrapper around TeX Live's official installer (version 20260301 — that is, the install-tl of TeX Live 2026). The old texlive package has been superseded by texlive-installer, whose package definition names the old one explicitly under REPLACES and BREAKS.

First, a word about where to get it. Install Termux from F-Droid or GitHub; the Google Play build is a different thing. The upstream project stopped distributing through the Play Store in November 2020, and the build currently on Play is a separate line maintained by an organisation called termux-play-store. The signing keys differ, so you cannot install one over the other, and the package set does not match upstream either. A great deal of the confusion between old tutorials and what is actually on your device starts here. What follows is the upstream procedure.

pkg update && pkg upgrade
termux-setup-storage          # grant access to shared storage

# The engines plus a wrapper around TeX Live's own installer.
pkg install texlive-installer

# Runs install-tl with -custom-bin and a Termux profile; keep the
# default TEXDIR or the binaries will not be found afterwards.
termux-install-tl

# Re-run this after every "tlmgr update --all": it repairs the
# scripts that assume a filesystem layout Android does not have.
termux-patch-texlive

termux-install-tl calls the official install-tl with -custom-bin and a Termux profile, then runs termux-patch-texlive and goes on to fmtutil-sys --byfmt pdflatex, updmap-sys and texlinks for you. That termux-patch-texlive has to be re-run after every tlmgr update --all — the installer says so on screen itself. The engines are the real pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, and the PDF they produce equals a desktop's. The Termux build does cut some things away, though: its package definition carries flags such as --disable-luajittex, --disable-mflua and --without-x. There is no LuaJITTeX, and tools that need X11 are not built.

Frankly, it is slow and it is heavy. How heavy depends on the scheme you choose, but a full install means resigning yourself to several gigabytes, and compile times are nothing like a laptop's. Typesetting Japanese takes the extra step of arranging the right packages and font maps with tlmgr. What still makes Termux worth it is one thing: a real engine running in your hand, somewhere with no signal. If you want an editor, Termux's X11 package set includes texstudio and texworks. If, on the other hand, you only want to write quickly and have it compile reliably, the browser is the safer bet than going deep here.

iOS / iPadOS: there are typesetting apps, but no TeX Live

On iPhone and iPad there is simply no option called “install TeX Live”. It is not a platform where arbitrary programs can be installed and run freely, and there is no general-purpose Linux environment equivalent to Android's Termux. What exists instead is a handful of App Store apps that bundle a TeX engine of their own, and that is the only route to typesetting on the device. The table below gives prices and last-updated dates as seen in the US App Store on 17 August 2026 — both change quickly, so always check the listing yourself.

That last row is the reason this page exists. Most articles you find by searching for “LaTeX app for iPad” recommend an app that stopped being updated years ago. Prices, availability and supported engines all move, so make a habit of checking the last-updated date in the App Store listing before you buy. Then return to the number from the opening: the Texifier app itself is 61 MB and the TeX Live here is 8.7 GB. A bundled engine can only carry the commonly used part — that is arithmetic, not a design flaw — and it is exactly why Texifier itself says that for the rare occasions when you need an obscure package it does not support locally, you can use its free cloud servers to typeset with a full TeX Live. On iOS, self-contained typesetting and a complete TeX Live cannot both be true at once.

It is only honest to describe the “run Linux on iOS” route too. iSH, which provides an Alpine Linux shell through user-mode x86 emulation, is on the App Store, and in principle Alpine's texlive package installs there. In practice, missing dependencies have been reported, and the report that texlive-full fails to install has been open since December 2020. Speed also pays the price of emulation. If you want to write dependably on an iPad, an external keyboard plus a browser remains the most reliable answer available.

Habits that make writing on mobile sustainable

Mobile works best when you treat it as a tool for keeping the manuscript moving. On the way somewhere, add a paragraph, fix a phrase, collect bibliography notes, draft a caption. Leave the final build — the heavy TikZ, the hundred images — to a desktop or to the cloud. Sync is convenient, but having the same file open on two devices at once invites conflicts, so save in small steps and compile once, properly, after you get back.

• Assume an external keyboard. On iPad or Android alike, it makes entering LaTeX symbols dramatically less painful.
• Keep a local copy of the whole source before submission, even when using a web editor — a ZIP or a synced folder will do.
• Try Termux or a bundled-engine app on notes and short articles first. Trust it with a thesis build only after that.

At a glance, by platform

To sum up: if you seriously want the typesetting to happen on the device, the Chromebook is comfortably ahead, Android works once you put the effort into Termux, and iOS / iPadOS comes down to which bundled-engine app you choose. And on every device the answer when in doubt is the same — open a browser. When the time comes that you want an environment of your own, the desktop installation page is waiting.