iPadOS 26.2 To Bring Back The Ability To Drag And Drop Apps For Multitasking

After revamping the multitasking experience in iPadOS 26 by adding window tiling and background processing, Apple is slowly bringing back some useful features from past iPadOS versions. With iPadOS 26.1, the company re-added Slide Over to the iPad, which lets you display an app in front of all others. To use it, you need to tap the three-button menu, long-press the green icon, and then tap Enter Slide Over. This makes it easier to keep information such as a video, an AI chatbot app for reference, the Notes app, etc., persistently on top while using other apps.

Now, with iPadOS 26.2 Beta 3, Apple is bringing back another important multitasking feature — the ability to drag and drop apps. Although very useful, this feature was removed in iPadOS 26. Now, if you're testing the Beta 3 of iPadOS 26.2, you can quickly switch between apps by dragging them from the Dock, Spotlight Search, or App Library and dropping them on the home screen.

If there's at least one app open on the home screen, users can drag and drop other apps into different multitasking views, including iPadOS 26.1's Slide Over. Apple also lets users drag an app to the middle of the screen to open windows of different sizes. The company also added visual indicators to let you know whether the app is going to open in the left or right portion or use the Slide Over layout. What makes the new drag-and-drop feature better is that even when you have apps opened in Slide Over or a tiled view, if you try to replace them with a new app, the previous ones will continue to remain open — thanks to iPadOS's new background management improvements.

It's still unclear if Apple will continue to tweak the drag-and-drop experience before the release, but at least beta testers can get to use this helpful feature that was once the best way to multitask on an iPad. That said, we're glad Apple is improving multitasking on iPadOS 26 to make it more similar to macOS.