Change “Open In” default for printing PDF in Apple Mail iPad

Tech Support
1

Several weeks ago I installed Bookends on my iPad. After installing, the default “Open In” option when “printing” a PDF in Apple Mail on the iPad defaults to the Bookends app.

I have searched the web and every setting I can think of but I cannot figure out how to change this. Prior to installing Bookends, “Open In” defaulted to PDF Expert, which is what I want.

Is there a way to change this back to default to my PDF reader of choice?

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2

I believe, and I hope this is not the only way, the way to fix this is to delete and reinstall the app you want as default. I vaguely remember a podcast where Federico Viticci said that the OS uses the most recently registered for that file type as the default

3

@dustinknopoff, thanks. I’ll give that a try and report back for the benefit of others.

1 Like
4

@dustinknopoff Unfortunately, that did not work. I uninstalled PDF Expert, closed Mail, restarted the iPad, reinstalled PDF Expert and then started Mail. It is still defaulting to Bookends. There is also no setting that I can find, including in Bookends and PDF Expert, that offers an option to set that app as the default.

Although it did not work, I appreciate the suggestion.

5

I’m interested in solving this, too. Over here, “Open in Scrivener” is the default PDF on my 12.9 iPad – which is confusing, since I’ve never used Scrivener for opening PDFs on that device.

6

This is always flaky. Apple needs a good solution. But the way that works most often for me is to go into the Files app, find a .pdf, and then choose to open it with the app that you want to be the default for that file type.

It seems this can convince the system that you want the file to open with that app.

7

@cheekyjeremy has a work around Which “sales” the problem until Apple releases a fix:

  1. Delete x app
  2. Reboot iPad
  3. Go to files, try to open the file type in question. If the x app no longer exists, surely it will open the file type on either the previous (PDF Expert or Preview etc). Then, once it updates that, maybe then you can reinstall x etc if you still need it.