With iPadOS 26.2, Apple is bringing two main upgrades to the iPad: Cut up View has returned, and Slide Over has a brand new gesture. Now, you possibly can simply drag and drop apps out of your dock, and so they’ll snap into place – there’ll now not be a must manually resize your home windows within the method you want them.
This was already how issues labored in iPadOS 18 and prior, and now it’s lastly again.
iPadOS 26 initially eliminated Slide Over
When Apple unveiled iPadOS 26 at WWDC25, they introduced a complete new windowing system for the iPad – making it far more just like the Mac. App home windows had visitors lights, you could possibly resize them as freely as you’d like, you could possibly have overlapping home windows, and also you weren’t pressured to make the most of Stage Supervisor.
This was superior for heavy iPad customers, however this got here at the price of the legacy multi-tasking system for lighter customers. For that reason alone, I finished liking my iPad as a lot – and finally I ended up simply utilizing apps in full display on a regular basis.
I beloved Slide Over for the benefit – it was nice simply having the ability to rapidly pull up an app (like Messages), learn one thing, and put it away. Windowing made this use case far more cumbersome at first, so I simply stopped utilizing my iPad in the identical method.
Apple did restore Slide Over to an extent in iPadOS 26.1, although it nonetheless required you to click on on the visitors lights to place the app into Slide Over mode. You couldn’t simply drag and drop it like you could possibly prior.
iPadOS 26.2 restores simplistic multi-tasking
Fortunately although, if you happen to’re somebody who dearly missed the multi-tasking out there previous to iPadOS 26, you received’t be lacking these days for for much longer.
iPadOS 26.2 shall be releasing imminently, and with that replace, the identical gestures to open apps in Cut up View and Slide Over that used to exist at the moment are again. It nonetheless works inside the Windowing system, so it’s not precisely the identical, however it’s extremely comparable.
As somebody who stopped utilizing my iPad for work after iPadOS 26 launched, I’m extremely grateful for these adjustments. I appreciated my iPad due to its simplicity, and with iPadOS 26, it felt a bit too Mac-like. I’m pleased to report that it’s now not too Mac-like with iPadOS 26.2, if you happen to don’t need it to be.
Sadly, you continue to can’t stack a number of apps on Slide Over such as you used to have the ability to, however I’m okay with that.
How do you’re feeling about iPadOS 26? Had been you somebody who missed Slide Over and Cut up View? Tell us within the feedback.
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