iPadOS 26 is an Absolute Mess

[maxoakland]

So far I liked the multitasking windows and menu bar, but turned it off because I usually don’t use my iPad with a keyboard and mouse. I think Liquid Glass sucks. It looks uglier on device than in pictures. It’s inconsistent. There are tons of different ways a button can look. There are serious legibility issues that have been pointed out multiple times

The worst part is my iPad can’t handle a lot of the animations. Frames are skipped. When I open a group on the home screen, it looks like it just appears with no animation because it drops all the opening frame animations. Even when not animating, the iPad struggles to keep up with my input in many situations.

And it doesn’t make much sense to me because the effects aren’t really that cool and don’t really look that good. There’s nothing *that* dynamic about them. There’s no reason to render a glass effect on buttons and icons that could easily be replicated by a PNG. So why are they doing it??

 

[Digitalguy]

And it's due to poor implementation by Apple. They should've replaced Stage Manager with the windowed mode and then had Stage Manager as a toggle in windowed mode. Then you still have three options: no multitasking, split screen/slide over, and windowed mode/stage manager. I really can't imagine that keeping the old code is that much of a maintenance burden that they had to get rid of it, considering Mac has how many multitasking modes they added over the years.

Instead I would have replaced no multitasking with split screen and slide-over, people are used to it and if you don't use them they don't bother you (and the other 2 options can stay)

 

[AlanMarron]

I was traveling when beta 4 was released, so I didn’t experience it until late yesterday.

I’m happy that LG has been smoothed, almost to the point that I don’t hate it. Almost.

I find it puzzling that Apple made so changes to functionality and to appearance at the same time. That’s a big bite of the 🍎. I wish that I had been consulted.