Why HEIC causes trouble on Android
The usual story is that someone with an iPhone sent you photos and your phone will not open them.
That story is now half out of date. Modern Android handles HEIC in the places that matter most, and Google Photos will show you the picture just fine on most phones.
The wall tends to appear somewhere else entirely. A job application form rejects the file. A print service will not accept it. An older tablet in the house shows a grey box. A desktop app on someone else’s computer refuses it.
In every one of those cases the fix is the same: turn the HEIC into a JPG, which nothing on earth refuses.
It is worth understanding why the rejections happen, because it explains which fix actually works. An app that cannot read HEIC is missing an HEVC decoder, and that is a licensing question rather than a technical one. Nobody is going to patch it for you. Converting the file sidesteps the whole problem.
Which Android phones and apps actually open HEIC
Support is uneven, and it depends more on the app than on the phone.
| Where you are | Opens HEIC? |
|---|---|
| Google Photos | Yes on modern Android versions |
| Samsung Gallery | Yes from One UI 2.0 (Android 10) onward |
| Older Android, roughly 9 and below | Usually not without help |
| Third-party apps and older tablets | Often not |
| Website upload forms | Frequently rejected |
| Messaging apps | Varies wildly, often re-compressed |
So “can Android open HEIC” is the wrong question. The better one is whether the specific app you need to hand the photo to will take it, and the honest answer is that you cannot predict it.
A JPG removes the question entirely.
How to convert HEIC to JPG on Android in 3 steps
1. Open this page in your phone browser
Chrome, Samsung Internet, Firefox and Edge all work. There is no app to install and no permission to grant.
2. Pick your photos
Tap the button and choose your HEIC files from the gallery, the Downloads folder, or wherever they landed after someone sent them.
You can select a whole album at once.
3. Convert and save
Tap Convert. Each photo is decoded on your phone and handed straight back as a JPG, which your browser saves to Downloads.
Your gallery app normally picks the new files up within a few seconds.
Chrome extensions do not work on Android
This one wastes a lot of people’s time, so it deserves saying plainly.
Chrome for Android does not support extensions from the Chrome Web Store. Not one of them, on any Android phone.
Search for a way to convert HEIC to JPG on Android and a good share of the results will point you at a Chrome extension. Every single one of those answers is describing a desktop browser.
A handful of alternative Chromium browsers on Android do support extensions, but installing a whole different browser to convert a photo is a strange trade.
A web page has no such problem. It runs the same code on a phone as it does on a laptop, because it is just a page.
The other ways, and when they are better
Converting HEIC to JPG on Android in the browser is not the only route, and it is not always the best one.
Google Photos
If your photos already sync to Google Photos, sharing a HEIC to an Android recipient generally delivers a JPG, because Google converts on the way out.
It is convenient, but you get no control over quality, it is awkward for batches, and it means your photos are in the cloud in the first place.
Samsung Gallery
On a Galaxy phone, opening a HEIC and re-saving or editing it will often leave you with a JPG copy. It works without any extra software, but it is a per-photo chore.
A converter app from the Play Store
Worth it if you convert photos constantly and want it built into the gallery, or if you need to work offline on a phone that struggles with big web pages.
The trade is the usual one: another app, another set of permissions, and in the free tiers, ads sitting next to your personal photos.
This page
Best when you want to convert HEIC to JPG on Android right now, for a handful of photos, with no installation and no upload. Everything happens on the phone, so nothing is queued behind your mobile signal.
If you are on a desktop rather than a phone, the same engine runs on our main HEIC to JPG converter, and HEIC to PNG if you need a lossless copy instead.
Ask the sender to change one setting
The methods above all deal with photos you have already received. There is a better fix for the ones still coming.
An iPhone can be told to shoot in a universally compatible format instead of HEIC, in Settings under Camera and then Formats. One tap on the sender’s phone and you never have to convert their photos again.
We wrote the steps up in how to turn off HEIC on an iPhone. It is worth sending to the person who keeps mailing you files your phone argues with.
The catch is that it only affects new photos, so you will still be converting whatever is already in your inbox.
What happens to the date and location
This matters more on a phone than on a desktop, so it is worth being direct about it.
When you convert HEIC to JPG on Android here, the photo is decoded to raw pixels and re-encoded. The EXIF block does not survive that, which means the shooting date, the camera settings and the GPS coordinates are all dropped from the JPG.
Most of the time that is exactly what you want. Sending a photo without the coordinates of your house attached is a feature, not a bug.
It does have one visible side effect. Your gallery app usually sorts by the date inside the file, so freshly converted JPGs tend to appear at the top of your timeline rather than next to the originals.
If you want the original date and location preserved, keep the HEIC as your copy of record and treat the JPG as the shareable version. To see exactly what is in a photo before you convert it, our HEIC EXIF viewer reads all of it on your device too.
Which quality setting to pick on a phone
The converter has a quality slider, and on a phone the right answer is usually a little lower than on a desktop.
Everything you convert has to travel somewhere afterwards, often over mobile data. A smaller file is worth real money on a metered plan.
Measured on that Galaxy A32 photo, quality 85 gave a 1.27 MB JPG and quality 75 gave 0.86 MB. At normal phone viewing sizes the two are indistinguishable.
Leave it at the default for photos you might print. Drop to 75 for anything headed into a chat app, which will re-compress the photo on its own anyway.
Your Android phone probably shoots HEIC too
Here is the part most guides miss. HEIC is not only an iPhone thing any more.
Samsung and Pixel cameras both offer a high-efficiency format setting, and plenty of phones ship with it available. The photo we used to measure this site’s converters came straight off a Samsung Galaxy A32 5G: 4000 by 3000 pixels, 1.38 MB, saved as HEIC by the phone itself.
So if your own gallery has files ending in .heic, your camera made them and no iPhone was involved. Our explainer on what a HEIC file is covers what the format stores and why phone makers moved to it.
Converting that photo at quality 85 produced a 1.27 MB JPG, and quality 75 brought it down to 0.86 MB. If you want to stop making new ones, the camera format setting is the place to go, though it will not touch the photos you already have.
Does converting on a phone actually work?
Phones are not laptops, and it would be dishonest to pretend the experience is identical.
Converting HEIC to JPG needs real memory to decode a 12 megapixel frame, and the page works on several photos at once to stay quick. On a recent phone that is fine. On an older or low-memory device, a very large batch can push the browser hard enough that it reloads the tab.
We keep the number of parallel jobs lower on devices that report less memory, which is the main defence against it.
If you hit trouble, convert in smaller groups. Twenty photos at a time is comfortable almost anywhere, and the result is identical either way.
The bottom line
Converting HEIC to JPG on Android does not need an app, a Chrome extension, or an upload to somebody’s server.
Open this page in whatever browser your phone already has, pick your photos, and save the JPGs. The work happens on your own hardware, which is why there is no file limit and no queue.
And if the HEIC files came from your own camera rather than an iPhone, check your camera’s format setting afterwards. It will save you doing this again next month.