Windowing, menu bar, and background processes come to iPadOS

For years now – it feels more like decades, honestly – Apple has been trying a variety of approaches to make the iPad more friendly to power users, most notably by introducing, and subsequently abandoning, various multitasking models. After its most recent attempts – Stage Manager – fell on deaf ears, the company has thrown its hands up in the air and just implemented what we all wanted on the iPad anyway: a normal windowing environment.

Apple today revealed an overhaul of iPad multitasking, introducing a completely new windowing system, a macOS-style Menu Bar, a pointer, and more.

The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar ‌iPad‌ experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time.
↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors

The new window manager includes tiling features, Exposé, support for multiple displays, and swiping twice on the home button will minimise all open windows. It’s literally the macOS way of managing windows transplanted onto the iPad, with some small affordances for touch input. This is excellent news, and should make the multitasking features of the iPad, which, at this point, is as powerful as a MacBook, much more accessible and effortless than all those hidden gesture-based features from before.

The amount of RAM in your iPad seems to determine how many active windows you can have open before the older ones get put to sleep, from four on the oldest iPad Pro models, to many more on the most recent models. Any windows above that limit will still be visible, but will just be a screenshot of their most recent state until you interact with them again. Any windows above a limit of twelve will be pushed to the recents screen instead.

In addition, and almost just as important, iPadOS 26 also introduces proper background processes, allowing applications to actually keep running in the background instead of being put to sleep. Anyone who has ever done any serious work on an iPad that involves long processes like exporting a video will consider this a godsend.

Now all we need is a proper terminal and Xcode and the iPad can be a real computer.