What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2

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.

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Top Rated Comments

DoogH Avatar
4 weeks ago
Multitasking on ipad is such a mess. It's so insanely complicated with a million ways to do very similar things for no reason.
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
pdaholic Avatar
4 weeks ago
I’m actually using my iPad again after installing this beta. If we can get multiple apps in slide over again, I’ll be content.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
beautyहमempty Avatar
4 weeks ago
final drag and drop again. I can’t even believe they got rid of that. Despite the more macOS like features, they could have simply kept slide over, drag and drop apps and Split View
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
MikeSmoke Avatar
4 weeks ago
This really is a great bring-back. The best of the old and the best of the new. The new broom may sweep cleaner, but the old broom knows the dirt.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
oneMadRssn Avatar
4 weeks ago

Multitasking on ipad is such a mess. It's so insanely complicated with a million ways to do very similar things for no reason.
Agreed. They somehow managed to make it more complicated but less useful than window multitasking on any other desktop/laptop OS.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
baryon Avatar
4 weeks ago
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.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)