What's New With Multitasking in iPadOS 26.2

Multitasking on ipad is such a mess. It's so insanely complicated with a million ways to do very similar things for no reason.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.