Using More Than Two Apps Simultaneously On Your iPad

Multitasking on the iPad has been around for a while, but now you can actually view more than two apps on the screen at the same time. While two active apps can exist side-by-side, or one as a floating window, you can have two apps plus a floating window with iOS 12. Unfortunately, the floating window makes the two main apps view-only. You can even add a fourth window as a video picture-in-picture.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
So you probably know that on an iPad you can have multiple apps on the screen at the same time. But did you know you can do three, or even four. Well, not really. But you can kind of get a third app on the screen and it's somewhat useful. You can do a fourth app but there's a big catch to it. So let's take a look at just doing two.

I'm going to go and launch an app. Let's just launch Safari here. Let's say I want Mail to actually be up as well. So I'm going to drag slightly up from the bottom to reveal the Dock. Then I can tap Mail and drag it to the right side of the screen. Now I've got both Safari and Mail up and I can use them both. I can drag the middle bar to maybe give them 50/50 for the screen. So this is the most useful. Two apps fully useable on the screen. Of course it works best with the Apple builtin apps or apps that support this. Some apps, like game apps, require the full screen. But you've got two. Now can you get three up?

Well, you may remember there's another way to get a second app up. I'm going to drag this one off there. Let's say I wanted to bring Mail up instead. But instead of putting it to the right side of the screen I'm just going to drop it here and it appears as a window. Now it has this window I can move back and forth and these apps are both useable. Now I'm going to drag it all the way off to the right side of the screen so it goes away. I'm going to bring up another app.

So with Safari still running let's bring up the dock there and let's just say I'm going to bring up iTunes. I'm going to drag that to the right side of the screen. Now I've got two apps there. I can move the middle line. Put them where I want. Now I can drag, from the right, over and Mail appears. Now I have three apps on the screen at the same time. Now it's not all that great because notice the two apps, the main ones, are grayed out. So in this mode you can't use all three apps. You can only use the floating one. You know, you can still view the information so that's kind of useful.

If I tap on either of the other two apps the floating one goes away. It's still easy to bring it up. So it's very nice. If you're waiting for an email to come in or a text message or something. You have a Messages app there. So it's nice to have that.

Now how can you get a fourth app. Well, the big catch is the fourth app has to be a Picture in Picture video. So here I've got a video on this webpage. If I tap to expand it full screen, because it's a YouTube video, then I get the full choice at the top left to make it Picture in Picture. So now it's a Picture in Picture kind of floating window there. Now I can still bring this floating window there. So now I have two floating windows, a video, Mail here in a floating window, and if I tap on the back here I still keep this floating video window but I have two other apps that now I can fully access.

So you can juggle things around and see four different things at once. Probably not that useful for the Picture in Picture. But I think it is pretty useful to actually have two apps here. Say If you're doing work on two apps and you want to bring a third in just to check something really quick and bring it away. It's much better than having the screen go away completely when completely switching to another app.

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