Formatting a paper on a phone sounds absurd until you're the one editing a camera-ready version on a train. Then it sounds like Tuesday.
Let me be straight. There is no magical Android app that formats your paper perfectly while you nap. Formatting is still mostly LaTeX on a real computer, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What an academic paper formatter app can do is get you most of the way there and catch the dumb mistakes. Honestly, the dumb mistakes are the ones that kill you.
Compare options on four things. Template support: does it handle the venues you actually submit to, or just a generic article class? Reference checking, because mangled citations cause more desk rejects than bad results. PDF validation: margins, fonts, page limits, the holy trinity of rejection triggers. And export quality, because a tool that produces broken PDFs isn't a tool.
The free versus paid question matters. Free tools cover the basics and catch the obvious errors. Paid tiers usually buy venue-specific templates and deeper checks. My rule: pay for the formatter only if you submit to the same venue family every year. Otherwise the free tier plus a careful eye is enough.
Here's the workflow that actually works. Write on the real machine. Validate with a paper formatting checker SaaS before submission. Keep a mobile app for academic submission deadlines nearby for the calendar side. Nobody ever missed a venue because their phone lacked a formatting app. They missed it because they forgot the date.
For the final pass, confjournal.fyi offers paper formatting and submission checks tuned to your target venue, which beats formatting by train.