With iPadOS 26, Apple has made the iPad more powerful than ever, but the cost of doing that was loosing access to Split View and Slide Over.
For years, these gestures made it possible to use two apps side-by-side or to pull in a floating panel with virtually zero mental overhead.
They were a fluid, lightweight and functional para-windowing model that worked really well in a touchscreen first device.
Today, these features are gone from the latest iteration of iPadOS.
Apple’s replacement is a full-blown windowing system. Apps now live inside resizable windows that float freely (or can be tiled together), a-la macOS. Apple adopted the iconic Traffic-light iconography from macOS, and last year tiling options. Stage Manager also remained as an option.
It’s undeniable that today’s system is more flexible. The iPad can now approximate a laptop experience. But this flexibility comes at a cost.
Slide Over. It was a fundamental experience of many that used the iPad. It enabled fast, temporary multitasking, apps lived on the edge of the display, allowing us to peek, act and then dismiss.
That workflow was instant, that simplicity was at home on a touchscreen device.
Now, in order to replicate that behavior in iPadOS 26, you have to:
- Open the dock;
- Drag an app into a new window;
- Resize it manually;
- Position it where you want;
- (and to recall it) Open back the dock or the Application Switcher and touch the app.
It works, but it’s not Slide Over.
iPadOS 26 feels conflicted. It’s the most powerful version of this OS, but it’s also the most complicated. Multitasking has turned into a labyrinth of swipes that don’t feel native on a touchscreen device.
Slide Over and Split View tamed this complexity by providing a narrow choice of options, choices that felt more opinionated. But, they made the iPad feel approachable, in contrast to iPadOS 26, that feels bolted with desktop paradigms.
The iPad was never meant to be a Mac. Its magic was rethinking how computing could work on a slab of glass.
Sent from my iPad