I’m not going to beat around the bush: iPadOS 26 and its new multitasking features are a game-changer for Apple’s tablets. Pretty much ever since Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 15 years ago (!), Apple has tried to straddle two worlds. In one, the iPad is a super-simple, easy-to-use tablet with a gorgeous display and tons of good apps from the App Store for gaming, entertainment and light work. The other world is one where the iPad replaces your traditional computer, letting people do the serious work that’s been typically reserved for a Mac or Windows PC. iPadOS has too often served as a hindrance to the latter goal over the years, particularly as the iPad Pro has gotten more powerful.
The Stage Manager multitasking experience Apple introduced with iPadOS 16 in 2022 was a major step towards making the iPad’s software suitable for power users — but it was rather buggy at launch and not as flexible as iPad power users were hoping for. The calls to just put macOS on the iPad grew louder. But this year, Apple took a different approach: it brought crucial macOS features like the familiar “stoplight” window controls, the menu bar at the top of the screen and vastly improved window management tools to iPadOS 26. The result is an iPad experience where you can easily jump between multiple windowed apps set up just how you like and one where you go full screen to focus on your content. It’s a massive refinement over the old Stage Manager experience and one that I think will finally satisfy iPad die-hards who want to push their tablets to the limit.
Before diving into the details, a quick word on betas and stability. As usual, Apple’s public betas feel pretty stable and capable, but that doesn’t mean you won’t run into weirdness here and there. App crashes, particularly with third-party apps, happened far more on this beta than with iPadOS 18. I’m confident those things will be ironed out as more developers update their apps for the new OS, but you’ll also run into things like UI inconsistencies and occasional stutters and jerkiness when jumping between apps. As we always say, think hard about what you’re willing to put up with to try a beta, even the relatively stable public beta. After all, the final version of iPadOS 26 will be out in just a few months.
Multitasking
Time for the nitty-gritty. When you update to iPadOS 26, you’ll be asked if you want to enable multitasking or have apps run in full screen mode only. When Apple says full screen only, they mean it. Past versions of iPadOS offered either Stage Manager or a basic, two-app split screen view with a third app available in a Slide Over window. The latter option is gone now, though you can still easily set up two or three apps side by side with iPadOS 26’s window tiling features. You can use multitasking mode or full screen only, with no in between. I think that’s a smart move, as plenty of people who use an iPad probably never use these multi-app features, and having a “multitasking on or off” toggle keeps things simple.
When you turn on multitasking mode, apps still open in full screen first — but you can grab any corner of the window to resize it or touch the top of the app and drag it around the screen. You could already do this with Stage Manager, so what really sets this new mode apart is how it interacts with other windows. Swiping up from the bottom of the display reveals the usual Home Screen view, but with your apps tucked to the side as a visual cue that you can add another app to that group. And, as before, you can move, resize and stack that app window wherever you want.
As I’m writing this, I have nine separate app windows open on my iPad, and getting around them feels more Mac-like than ever before. I can swipe up and hold from the bottom of the Home Screen and see every open app in a smaller window, which makes finding the specific thing I want a lot easier; I can also just command-tab through them. Apps can be minimized down to the dock and when I want the app back, it’ll pop open in the same size window and same placement as before. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen twice minimizes everything I have open to start fresh — but again, if I reopen those apps, they’ll go back to exactly where I had them set up before.
I realize it sounds kind of silly to make a big deal of this, but it’s hard to overstate how much this improves the iPad multitasking experience. With Stage Manager, I was never quite sure where an app would open or if it would be full screen or windowed. It can be useful for setting up multiple groups of apps, but adding and removing apps from that view was not terribly intuitive. Just opening everything in one space is a lot more intuitive. And if you want to have various different spaces with specific apps, you can still turn on Stage Manager. It’s a lot easier to add and remove apps from various different groups than it used to be; minimizing a window puts it into its own space that you can add more apps to (or just use it on its own).
There are a few other new components that make multitasking work as well as it does. These should be quite familiar to Mac users: The three-button “stoplight” controls and the menu bar. The stoplight buttons replace a similar three-dot window management system from older versions of iPadOS but are far more intuitive. The red one closes an app window entirely, the green one makes a window full screen and then yellow one minimizes it to the dock. These controls are crucial to making iPadOS 26 feel more flexible and fluid than ever before, particularly if you want to have more than one window of a single app open. I’ve also found them to be crucial when working with multiple apps on a smaller display, like on the 11-inch iPad Pro. Stage Manager usually felt like more trouble than it was worth on anything but a 13-inch iPad, but these new multitasking features make it easy to flip through a bunch of apps and pop into full screen if I need more space.
The expanded window tiling controls here also make that easier. If you press and hold the stoplight buttons, you’ll get more options to resize apps to take up a quarter, third or half the screen; you can also grab drag bars to further adjust how much space each app takes up. I really liked a mode where three iPhone-sized apps fill the screen, and when there was something I wanted to devote more focus to, I just hit its green button and went full screen.
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