With iPadOS 26.2, Apple is bringing two major upgrades to iPad: Split View is back, and Slide Over is getting a new gesture. Now, you can simply drag and drop apps from your dock and they’ll automatically snap into place — no more manually resizing your windows.
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This was the way things worked in iPadOS 18 and earlier, and now it's finally back.
When Apple introduced iPadOS 26 at WWDC25, it announced a completely new windowing system for the iPad, making it much more Mac-like. App windows had traffic lights, you could resize them freely, have overlapping windows, and you weren't forced to use Stage Manager.
This was beneficial for heavy iPad users, but it came at the cost of the old multitasking system for lighter users. Because of this, I stopped enjoying my iPad as much and ended up using full-screen apps all the time.
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Slide Over to use. The new windowing system made it much more complicated, so many people stopped using the iPad in the same way.
Apple brought back Slide Over to some 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 before.
Luckily, if you missed the multitasking system that existed before iPadOS 26, you won't miss these days for much longer.
iPadOS 26.2 is coming soon, and with this update, the same gestures for opening apps in Split View and Slide Over that were previously available are back. It still works within the windowing system, so it's not exactly the same, but it's incredibly similar.
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Unfortunately, you still can't stack multiple apps on Slide Over like you used to be able to, but that may change soon.
