First Look: iPadOS 26 Public Beta

iPadOS 26, now available as a public beta, is one of the biggest updates in iPad history. There’s a new design that changes the look and feel of the whole interface, yes, but also the introduction of a whole raft of productivity features that lift the iPad closer to the Mac—for those who want to use it that way.

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads. The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.

An invasion of glass

Album art can slide under the frosted-glass sidebar in the Music app.

Apple is introducing a new design language across all its operating systems for the ’26 “model year,” and that means iPadOS is getting more rounded elements, a bunch of “Liquid Glass” elements that are translucent with glass distortion effects, and more.

In the time since introducing these operating systems, Apple keeps tweaking the design, so it’s hard to judge it completely. Apple’s trying all sorts of different techniques to keep the cool look of transparent glass elements without sacrificing legibility, with varying degrees of success. Backgrounds dim or are faded in or out to enhance contrast; text colors sometimes invert; color schemes alter based on what you’re scrolling and how fast you’re scrolling it. And in the four developer betas that preceded the Public Beta, the sands seemed to be shifting with every single release.

On the iPad, it’s a real jumble. Some stuff looks cool, while other stuff is unreadable. For the most part, the new design didn’t hinder my use of iPadOS 26, and given those shifting sands I’m going to withhold my most withering design criticisms for a later time. But, yeah… Apple either needs to figure this thing out, and fast, or it should just frost all the glass for release and keep working on it in the background until it finds a more usable solution.

Embracing windows (and the Menu Bar)

With window power comes window management, like the familiar “stoplight” buttons. You have to tap/click to enlarge them before using them, though.

iPadOS 26 will be remembered as the update where Apple declared bankruptcy on all its previous attempts to do windowing and multitasking on the iPad, and released an entirely new windowing system that has been unabashedly inspired by the Mac.

In earlier eras, Apple reluctantly accepted multitasking by introducing Split View and Slide Over, and then later Stage Manager, which created a windowing system that was not Mac-like at all. Windows couldn’t be resized freely, or placed freely, or overlap other windows in the wrong way.

Apple is over it. Go ahead, put those windows wherever you want (even hanging off the side of the screen), resize them to any size, put other windows on top, and even control them using the three familiar stoplight buttons in the top left corner. It works more or less the same as the Mac, and it works on all iPads that can run iPadOS 26, even the iPad mini. It also works on external displays, and I admit to forgetting more than once that I was using iPadOS when it was attached to my Studio Display.

There’s a limit to the total number of active windows you can have open at once, but I certainly never felt constrained in my use on a 13-inch iPad Pro, or even on that 27-inch Studio Display. If you’re an inveterate window-keeper-opener you might feel differently, but it all seemed perfectly normal to me. Apps that have been built for prior forms of iPad windowing work with the new system well.

There are plenty of ways that iPadOS stands ready to assist you with window management, too. Stage Manager is no longer a windowing system, but just an optional window-collection utility like it is on the Mac. You can click and hold on the green stoplight button (yep, those familiar Mac elements are now part of iPadOS) in any window to be offered a set of tiling options, just as on the Mac. And a full suite of keyboard shortcuts will move windows around, too, from Globe-F to toggle full screen to more esoteric ones like Globe-Control-Right Arrow to tile your window on the right half of the screen.

If you’re not using a keyboard, you can also flick windows with your finger to manage them. Flicking to the top makes them go full screen, and to the sides will tile them on half the screen. Windows remember their previous position and size, so if you drag a window back out from a tiled position, it goes back to its previous state. Double tapping on the top of the window also will toggle between full screen and a floating window.

Exposé helps you keep track of many iPad windows.

And there’s more. Swipe up a little from the bottom (either on your trackpad or with your finger) and Exposé kicks in, showing all your current open windows so you can pick the right one to bring forward. Swipe a little further up and you get access to your home screen, including widgets. (You can also click on the wallpaper to do this.) The windows all slide to the sides of your screen, so you can bring them back with one tap, or swipe up again to hide them entirely. You can also tap on an app in the Dock to bring up all its open windows.

It’s really a flexible set of controls that works well whether you’re using a keyboard and trackpad or your fingers. Not only does this all work well, but it will be instantly familiar to Mac users. After a decade of Apple resisting the Mac as a model for iPad multitasking, it’s finally given in to the obvious: the Mac is great at this, and if Apple can’t come up with something better for the iPad, then it should implement the very best windowing interface in the world. The iPad isn’t becoming the Mac, but it’s built a windowing system that works really well, and that’s thanks to the Mac.

And if you don’t want to use windowing on your iPad? Well, the feature is turned on and off with a single button in Control Center. Just as I use my iPad with the Magic Keyboard only a small portion of the time, I use my iPad in multi-window mode a very similar portion of the time. The rest of the time, it’s in single-window mode and works just fine.

I’ve heard from some fans of Split View and Slide Over, two original iPad multitasking features that have been killed in iPadOS 26. While I understand their frustration, it’s quite easy to tile two windows in iPadOS 26, at which point you’ve basically got Split View. Having an app hiding on the side ready to slide in is an interesting use case, but it was always too easy to stick an app there and not be able to get it out, so I suspect Apple is making the iPad less susceptible to frustration by killing the feature entirely. Multitasking: you’re either in or you’re out. No middle ground.

Exploring the many menu items in Notes.

Speaking of the Mac’s influence in the iPad, it extends beyond windowing to… the Menu Bar. That’s right, after teasing us with the possibility for four years, Apple has finally decided that apps in multi-window mode can offer a Menu Bar. It only appears when you’re in multi-window mode, and only when you activate it by moving the pointer to the top of the screen, swiping down with a finger, or typing Command-shift-slash to search an app’s menus. And it’s centered, which is… not quite Mac-like, but close enough.

Currently, the contents of that Menu Bar are mostly the things that were previously on offer when you held down the Command key to see what keyboard shortcuts were available, but app developers now have access to an API that lets them set more complex sets of menu items.

I love this idea. For years I’ve been using iPad apps that are sometimes close to as dense and full-featured as their Mac equivalents, and frequently find myself baffled about just where a certain feature might be hidden behind an icon, inside a tab, down at the bottom of a scrollable pane. Organizing functions in menus is another classic Mac feature that really does make sense for complicated software—and even for relatively simple stuff! It just takes a little bit of a mental shift. But within an hour of installing the first iPadOS 26 beta, I found myself invoking a feature of an iPad app from the Menu Bar.

In fact, I think Apple should go one step further and let users opt to keep the Menu Bar visible all the time. The status bar items on the top left and right of the screen are basically the same height, so why not? Perhaps in the future, Apple could also give users more control of what appears in the status bar, following its own lead in allowing Control Center items on macOS to be arbitrarily added or removed from the Menu Bar itself.

As a fan of the original iPad pointer, I’m sad to report that it’s been replaced by a new, Mac-inspired one. The reason the old one died is a pretty good one: it was meant to represent the touch target of iPad software designed for fingers, and Apple is now accepting that sometimes pro users want more precise pointer control than that. (Also, those new stoplight buttons are smaller than the old pointer circle!) I’ll miss the morphing cursor because I think it might’ve been the strongest example of the iPad rethinking and outdoing an old Mac idea, but the new pointer fits like a comfortable old shoe.

Pro podcasts and Files

For years, those of us who do audio or video work have lamented that iPads (and iPhones) are unsuitable for a lot of podcasting/video work because they aren’t able to record audio or video locally while also participating in a call over an app like Zoom. In iPadOS 26, Apple has solved the issue by adding support for local background recording.

It’s a relatively simple interface: Choose your input microphone, turn on local recording in Control Center, and your call will be saved out when you’re done. It won’t work when you’re not actively using a microphone (and optionally, a camera), so the feature can’t be used for snooping. In all of my testing, it’s worked quite well, though I wish it supported the ability to manually adjust the gain of the microphone since some microphones are too loud and others are too quiet. But beyond that, it just works—and means that podcasters can just bring an iPad or iPhone and a USB microphone and get their jobs done.

You can choose what shows up in Files columns now.

Ever since the introduction of the Files app, Apple has been slowly tiptoeing toward the idea that some iPad (and iPhone) users might need to manage files in a filesystem the same way that Mac users do. The Files app in iPadOS 26 has been upgraded to feel more, shall we say, Finderesque. As someone who lives in List views, it’s a relief to see that Apple has let the columns in this view be customizable, so I can sort my list by creation or last-modified date, while seeing the type and size of the files, just the way I like it. Files also displays folders with a disclosure triangle, which you can click or tap on to expand and see the contents inside that folder. Again, not a revolutionary idea—but it wasn’t there, and now it is, and that’s progress.

Another huge feature that Mac users take for granted, but wasn’t really a part of iPadOS before, is the ability to open files in specific apps and to set default apps for file types. To assign all your files to a specific app, just select one, choose Get Info, and choose a default from that panel. If you’re someone who is opening files from within Files, you will find it a major improvement.

There’s also a major improvement when it comes to long file copies, especially ones happening across a network: they generate a progress window that can be made into a Live Activity, allowing you to leave Files while you keep tabs on the progress of the operation.

This is part of a larger upgrade to iPadOS that allows apps that perform lengthy, finite tasks to do so in the background. Previously, apps with lengthy exports—Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are two good examples—had to be kept in front until they were done with their jobs. That sort of single-mindedness would never fly on the Mac, where you can always switch to another app while you’re doing an export (or file copy). That ends in iPadOS 26, and I look forward to trying out apps that have been updated to support the new background tasks API.

Shortcuts get smarter

I rebuilt an iPad shortcut to use Apple’s Private Cloud Compute model.

With iPadOS, Shortcuts take a huge leap forward with the introduction of the new Use Model action, which lets you tie in workflows to Apple’s on-device and Private Cloud Compute AI models, as well as ChatGPT itself. The Six Colors staff has already built several automations using this feature, and while the results can be somewhat random and take some effort to process, they can also enable the creation of workflows that were previously impossible using Apple’s existing tools. Shortcuts also now includes pre-baked Apple Intelligence features, like Writing Tools summaries.

These models will transform some automations. Let me give you an example: When I write on my iPad, I still need to upload images to my server to be displayed along with the article. I built a workflow in Shortcuts to do the job, but given the inscrutable hidden filenames of items in the Photos library, I had to build in a step where I see a preview of my image and give it a filename.

I rebuilt this workflow in iPadOS 26 using Use Model to pass the image to Private Cloud Compute and ask it for two responses: a text description of the contents of the image and an appropriate filename. While I had to add some validation to avoid weird responses, the results were instantaneous: I no longer need to name the files, because Private Cloud Compute does the job perfectly well. Uploading images from my iPad just became much easier, and that’s just my first step.

New apps and updates

There are a few notable app additions in iPadOS 26, the biggest of which is Preview, a longtime Mac favorite that’s finally making the move to the iPad. I’ve written a lot of this review in multi-window mode with both a text editor and Preview open, and it’s just a pleasure to use compared to using the previous stock choice, Quick Look mode inside the Files app.

Preview’s a great utility for viewing PDFs and other files, and on the iPad it gets access to mark-up features that are especially useful to users of the Apple Pencil. I’m sure dedicated PDF marker-upers have their own preferred apps to do the job, but as a person who very occasionally has to mark up a PDF, I’m looking forward to having access to Preview combined with my Pencil Pro. (I probably won’t use the new calligraphy pen style while marking up my PDFs, though.)

The Journal app, which was introduced by Apple in 2023 but only on the iPhone, has come to the iPad and the Mac this year. I never really used the Journal app on the iPhone, because for me the iPhone is the device I use when I’m out and about—and too busy for something like journal entries. The iPad, on the other hand, fits perfectly in my life for those more laid-back, contemplative moments. I’m glad the app has made the move… but seriously, what took it so long? It took two OS cycles to put an iPhone app on Apple’s other platforms?

One final note about a new feature in an old app—or is it an old feature? In any event, last year Apple tried to merge the main Photos interface into a split view to show off both the photo library and its rich Collections view. I thought it was a smart, if inelegant, design choice since so many people have no idea how much Apple has put into surfacing photos using Collections.

The inelegance (and a pretty vociferous user reaction to the change) seems to have prompted a re-think. Photos now defaults to the Library view, with Collections available from the sidebar. I hope people will tap over there and look at their Collections; there’s no point in having tens of thousands of photos in iCloud if you only ever look at the dozen most recent ones.

Big swings for the platform

This is just a public beta, but the vibes are good. Apple’s new windowing system is great, embracing all the things that make the Mac work without forcing it on people who don’t want it. The improvements to Files, support for background recording, and the new background tasks Live Activities are somewhat small changes on their own, but assembled together they create an iPad that just feels more ready for professional productivity tasks.

Not everyone wants to use the iPad in a professional productivity context, and that’s fine. But if Apple’s going to keep selling the iPad Pro at prices higher than a MacBook Air and approaching a MacBook Pro, with the hardware of those computers inside, it needs its software story to match up. I know it seems hard to believe, but iPadOS 26 may end that narrative for good.

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