With iPadOS 26.2, Apple is bringing two major upgrades to the iPad: Split View has returned, and Slide Over has a new gesture. Now, you can just drag and drop apps from your dock, and they’ll snap into place – there’ll no longer be a need to manually resize your windows in the manner you need them.
This was already how things worked in iPadOS 18 and prior, and now it’s finally back.
iPadOS 26 initially removed Slide Over
When Apple unveiled iPadOS 26 at WWDC25, they announced a whole new windowing system for the iPad – making it much more like the Mac. App windows had traffic lights, you could resize them as freely as you’d like, you could have overlapping windows, and you weren’t forced to utilize Stage Manager.
This was awesome for heavy iPad users, but this came at the cost of the legacy multi-tasking system for lighter users. For this reason alone, I stopped liking my iPad as much – and ultimately I ended up just using apps in full screen all the time.
I loved Slide Over for the ease – it was great just being able to quickly pull up an app (like Messages), read something, and put it away. Windowing made this use case much more cumbersome at first, so I just stopped using my iPad in the same way.
Apple did restore Slide Over to an extent in iPadOS 26.1, though it still required you to click on the traffic lights to put the app into Slide Over mode. You couldn’t just drag and drop it like you could prior.
iPadOS 26.2 restores simplistic multi-tasking
Luckily though, if you’re someone who dearly missed the multi-tasking available prior to iPadOS 26, you won’t be missing those days for much longer.
iPadOS 26.2 will be releasing imminently, and with that update, the same gestures to open apps in Split View and Slide Over that used to exist are now back. It still works within the Windowing system, so it’s not exactly the same, but it’s incredibly similar.
As someone who stopped using my iPad for work after iPadOS 26 released, I’m incredibly grateful for these changes. I appreciated my iPad because of its simplicity, and with iPadOS 26, it felt a bit too Mac-like. I’m happy to report that it’s no longer too Mac-like with iPadOS 26.2, if you don’t want it to be.
Unfortunately, you still can’t stack multiple apps on Slide Over like you used to be able to, but I’m okay with that.
How do you feel about iPadOS 26? Were you someone who missed Slide Over and Split View? Let us know in the comments.
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