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What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2

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With the third beta of iPadOS 26.2 that came out yesterday, Apple made some useful updates to the way that multitasking works on the iPad.


iPadOS 26.1 brought back Slide Over, one of the main multitasking views from iPadOS 18 that was removed in iPadOS 26. In iPadOS 26.2, Slide Over works more like it did before, and there are also useful new options for replacing apps in a tiled view.

When in Windowed or Stage Manager mode in iPadOS 26.2, you can drag and drop apps into various multitasking views, including Slide Over. Apps can be dragged over from the Dock, Spotlight search, or App Library.

Drag an app to the left or right side of the display to enter a tiled view that's similar to Split View. Drag an app further left or right to establish it as a Slide Over app. There are visual indications that let you know when an app is in a left, right, or Slide Over position.

If you have a Slide Over window open or apps in a tiled view, you can drag another app over the top of the existing one to put the new app in its position. You still can't stack multiple apps up in Slide Over, but at least you can now drag apps into place like you could in iPadOS 18.

Article Link: What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/18/ipados-26-2-multitasking-hands-on/
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Thanks for the preview!

I'm eager for all these iPadOS 26 improvements to get finalized so we can move onto learning about the trickle of iPadOS 27 features.
 
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I'd still like it if the title of the article used beta in the title. 26.2 has not been released yet, but it's mentioned that way multiple times. But no one really cares anymore amongst this geeky crowd. 🤣
 
This is a huge win for iPad Mini users! It was too many extra steps to use split view from windowing mode so having this plus slide over back is very satisfying. Thank you iPadOS team!
 
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Good video. Very happy with the changes. Will definitely be updating once the final version is released to try this out.
 
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Honestly I have a lil feeling of ram eater, I guess 1tb iPads are now basic for 16gb ram
 
MacRumors said:


With the third beta of iPadOS 26.2 that came out yesterday, Apple made some useful updates to the way that multitasking works on the iPad.


iPadOS 26.1 brought back Slide Over, one of the main multitasking views from iPadOS 18 that was removed in iPadOS 26. In iPadOS 26.2, Slide Over works more like it did before, and there are also useful new options for replacing apps in a tiled view.

When in Windowed or Stage Manager mode in iPadOS 26.2, you can drag and drop apps into various multitasking views, including Slide Over. Apps can be dragged over from the Dock, Spotlight search, or App Library.

Drag an app to the left or right side of the display to enter a tiled view that's similar to Split View. Drag an app further left or right to establish it as a Slide Over app. There are visual indications that let you know when an app is in a left, right, or Slide Over position.

If you have a Slide Over window open or apps in a tiled view, you can drag another app over the top of the existing one to put the new app in its position. You still can't stack multiple apps up in Slide Over, but at least you can now drag apps into place like you could in iPadOS 18.

Article Link: What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2
Click to expand...
MacRumors said:


With the third beta of iPadOS 26.2 that came out yesterday, Apple made some useful updates to the way that multitasking works on the iPad.


iPadOS 26.1 brought back Slide Over, one of the main multitasking views from iPadOS 18 that was removed in iPadOS 26. In iPadOS 26.2, Slide Over works more like it did before, and there are also useful new options for replacing apps in a tiled view.

When in Windowed or Stage Manager mode in iPadOS 26.2, you can drag and drop apps into various multitasking views, including Slide Over. Apps can be dragged over from the Dock, Spotlight search, or App Library.

Drag an app to the left or right side of the display to enter a tiled view that's similar to Split View. Drag an app further left or right to establish it as a Slide Over app. There are visual indications that let you know when an app is in a left, right, or Slide Over position.

If you have a Slide Over window open or apps in a tiled view, you can drag another app over the top of the existing one to put the new app in its position. You still can't stack multiple apps up in Slide Over, but at least you can now drag apps into place like you could in iPadOS 18.

Article Link: What's New With Multitasking in iPad
Click to expand...

MacRumors said:


With the third beta of iPadOS 26.2 that came out yesterday, Apple made some useful updates to the way that multitasking works on the iPad.


iPadOS 26.1 brought back Slide Over, one of the main multitasking views from iPadOS 18 that was removed in iPadOS 26. In iPadOS 26.2, Slide Over works more like it did before, and there are also useful new options for replacing apps in a tiled view.

When in Windowed or Stage Manager mode in iPadOS 26.2, you can drag and drop apps into various multitasking views, including Slide Over. Apps can be dragged over from the Dock, Spotlight search, or App Library.

Drag an app to the left or right side of the display to enter a tiled view that's similar to Split View. Drag an app further left or right to establish it as a Slide Over app. There are visual indications that let you know when an app is in a left, right, or Slide Over position.

If you have a Slide Over window open or apps in a tiled view, you can drag another app over the top of the existing one to put the new app in its position. You still can't stack multiple apps up in Slide Over, but at least you can now drag apps into place like you could in iPadOS 18.

Article Link: What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2
Click to expand...
That’s awesome. The new multi tasking is great if using and external display but while hand handling your iPad I just not good enough. I’m happy split over is coming back.
 
This entire situation is basically the worst possible case scenario I could have imagined in the past years when people were begging to make the iPad more Mac like. They ripped out the system for touch and replaced it with one that’s clunky and annoying without a mouse. I don’t know why they had to completely toss out the old system that was working fine if they’re going to provide three options anyways.

If an app supports the new system, it also supports the old system, because it’s just a way for the OS to resize apps to a given size. There’s not much 3rd party complication here, it’s mostly on Apple.

I am super happy that the people who wanted the iPad to have more mac-like features got what they wanted. But to me it is a tablet, I just want to do tasks that require 1-2 apps on it, and easily be able to get in and out of that. The old system was elegant bordering on perfect, even this new attempt still has a large amount of friction. The reason I typically like Apple software is because they avoid these kinds of pain points. If they don’t get serious about fixing this I probably will not buy another iPad, and it used to be my second favorite Apple product line.

I am downloading the beta now to try it, I will amend my post if I’m wrong. The video seems to imply it still requires thinking about windows far more than I have any interest to when using an iPad.

—

Edit after trying: It’s better than the video made it look. It’s still worse than it was before but tolerable now. (Buggy, rotating into portrait seems to banish the non-focused window to be inaccessible.) HUGE step in the right direction. I could see them refining this into something at least as good given a few more updates. New annoyance is you can’t do the swipe from left edge back gesture, that triggers it trying to resize the window even if it’s on the left side of the screen.

Opening a new app from the dock just places it “on top of” the Split View which is also annoying. Hopefully they don’t leave it here.
 
Last edited:
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I don't know what it is, on paper all these sound like great ideas, I just can't seem to get into anything when it comes to multitasking (outside of video PiP).

Am I alone on this?
 
The only thing I really hate is that you can accidentally resize full screen windows if you drag from any corner. This also disabled the drag-from-corner shortcuts that I used a lot. In iOS 18, you could use the corner shortcuts as well as split view and slideover. Now if you want to use corner shortcuts you have to completely disable multitasking. And if you use multitasking, you have this whole mess of a billion ways to multitask, when realistically on an iPad Mini I NEVER want to resize windows. I just want split view and slideover, and nothing else. With all these complex interaction modes, it would not be a huge deal for Apple to just add adjustments to how deep you want to multitask. I don't want the menu bar, the corner resize and the traffic lights, because they're too small to use and too easy to accidentally invoke.

Now you can drag down from the top right corner to do control center, drag down from the top left to do notification center, drag down from the top middle for the menu bar, drag either corner diagonally to resize... it's a bit too much. And turning off multi tasking means I lose the one thing I like: slideover.
 
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