Apple’s iPadOS 26 operating system enhances multitasking with new capabilities while removing the existing Split View and Slide Over modes.
The Slide Over feature in iPadOS 18 and earlier lets you run an app in a smaller vertical window that floats and can be dragged to either screen edge. Split View lets you run two apps simultaneously in a side-by-side arrangement.
Thanks to the multitasking improvements in iPadOS 26, however, Split View and Slide Over are no longer available. Instead, iPadOS lets you freely position app windows on the screen, like on the Mac, and you can have multiple app windows.
iPadOS 26 does away with Split View and Slide Over
One of the new features in iPadOS 26 is an improved windowing system, which now supports more app windows on the screen at the same time compared to iPadOS 18 and earlier versions. On older iPads, however, hardware constraints prevent you from using more than four windows at once.
There’s also an Exposé-like “God view” of all the open windows activated by swiping up on the trackpad or screen with four fingers.
As Apple explains in the official iPadOS 26 press release, the new windowing system on iPadOS 26 lets you freely place windows anywhere on the screen, doing away with an invisible grid. Like on the Mac, windows remember their last position and size, reappearing in the same spot when you reopen them or restart the device. Plus, windows can finally be grouped into distinct stages in the Stage Manager.
iPadOS 26 also brings macOS-like traffic-light controls in the upper-left corner to close, minimize, maximize and tile windows. Windows can overlap and you can rearrange them using tiling options, with two to four apps side-by-side.
The menu bar and background tasks
Another iconic Mac feature, the menu bar at the top of the screen, has also made a leap onto the iPad. Swipe down from the top edge of the display or move the pointer to the top to reveal the translucent menu bar. Browsing menus is one of the ways to explore all options in an app and their associated keyboard shortcuts.
iPadOS 26 brings improvements to background app execution by permitting computationally intensive tasks to run in the background. For example, things like exporting a Final Cut Pro video.
Background tasks provide progress updates via the Live Activities feature, which displays real-time updates from apps on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island.