Apple Brought Back 1 of the iPad’s Best Features. Fans Thought It Was Gone for Good

I love the iPad. I’ve always loved the iPad, both as a work device and as a way to read, stream video, or edit photos and podcasts. I currently have an M4 iPad Pro, and it’s probably my favorite computing device Apple has ever made.

For all of the ways I love the iPad, it’s had one major drawback—doing more than one thing has always been pretty clunky. I guess you could argue that’s more of a benefit if what you want is to use your iPad as a focus device. But, if you want to do normal work things, the iPad’s complicated multitasking was more of a chore than it was worth.

Then, Apple announced iPadOS 26, and with it, the company gave the iPad the one thing its biggest fans had been asking for–windowing. Not the watered-down version of multitasking, but actual windowing. In this wonderful new iPad world, you can place windows pretty much anywhere and make free-form adjustments.

Killing off the best feature

There was just one problem: with all the changes, Apple killed what might have been its best features—Slide Over. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I get it. Slide Over was kind of a power-user feature that basically let you dock an app to the side of the display, and slide it in and out of view as needed.

Surely, Apple knows how many people use Slide Over, and I have to think the number isn’t huge. It’s the kind of feature that is incredibly intuitive and useful to people who use it all the time. At the same time, it’s the kind of feature you could use an iPad for years and never notice.

Which is why it seemed strange that Apple killed it. You don’t have to think that Slide Over is a good idea to recognize that it was a bad idea for Apple to remove it. It doesn’t cost you anything for this particular feature to exist, but for people who benefited from it, Slide Over was a super useful productivity feature.

A clever way to interact with apps

I’m sure Apple assumed that its windowing changes would meet the needs of power users, but Slide Over offered something that you couldn’t get from just the ability to put two windows next to each other. It meant you could keep apps you use often, but not as your primary focus (think messaging apps and email), just a swipe away.

That’s why so many people were bummed that Apple killed it off. It might not have been the most obvious feature, but it was very useful.

Everyone’s favorite feature is back

Now, however, in the iPadOS 26.2 beta, Slide Over is back. Well, sort of. It’s mostly the same, though it’s a tad more finicky, presumably due to the underlying windowing control that Apple built into iPadOS 26.

The two major differences are that you can only have one app in Slide Over at a time. Previously, you could have a stack that you swiped through at the bottom. Now, you only get one, and if you try to add a second, it’ll boot the first back to the “desktop.”

The other difference is how you get an app into Slide Over. Previously, you could just drag the app up to the side of the screen, and it would anchor itself there. Now, you open the app, then tap and hold the green traffic light icon and select the “Open in Slide Over” option.

It’s definitely more work and more limited, but for people who were used to having Slack or Messages always a swipe away, it’ll be a welcome update. More importantly, I think it’s a very good sign that Apple is paying close attention to how people want to use the iPad. I don’t think there’s any question that iPadOS 26, overall, was the biggest improvement to iPadOS, maybe ever. Now, it’s even better for those of us who know that Slide Over was the iPad’s very best feature.