Cadmium sulfide (CdS) films are widely used in the field of semiconductor devices. However, most of CdS films crystallized in hexagonal poly-crystalline structure. Here, cubic CdS films are first successfully grown on the TiO2-termined (001) SrTiO3 substrate using ultra high vacuum evaporation system. The XRD patterns and the RHEED patterns display the structural transformation for the films from the hexagonal phase to the cubic one with increasing the substrate temperature. In this paper, we show that the cubic phase of the CdS films is more stable than the hexagonal one. There is a photoacoustic behavior due to the different surface localized states between the two kinds of structures and the greatly decrease of the defects in the film. The heterostructure of the cubic CdS on perovskite-like SrTiO3 may open a new applications of CdS. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.