Two weeks after the first beta release of iPadOS 26.1, Apple has released the second developer beta. The highlight of Beta 2 is that it somewhat restores Slide Over multitasking.

How Slide Over Works Now

There are some key differences in how Slide Over works today versus how it worked in iPadOS 18.

To get a supported app into Slide Over, tap and hold the traffic light buttons to pull up your multitasking options. At the bottom of the panel, you should see an “Enter Slide Over” option if the app supports it. The app then animates into a floating Slide Over window, on what feels like a glass platter, that appears on top of the other apps you have open.

As before, the Slide Over window can live on the left or right side of the display.

Combined with the more flexible windowing system in iPadOS 26, this marks the first time you can open a Slide Over app from the Home Screen, by itself.

Unlike in iPadOS 18, Slide Over is now a single-app affair. There can only be a single app in Slide Over at a time. When you move another app into Slide Over, the current app gets removed and bumped into its own window.

A nice improvement in this updated implementation is that the Slide Over window itself is now resizable, which gives you more flexibility in how you use it. This has the somewhat funny side benefit of making it so that apps that don’t support resizing, like Final Cut Pro, can participate in Slide Over.

For those using a physical keyboard, there are keyboard shortcuts for moving a window into or out of Slide Over.

Slide Over is accessible when using Windowed Apps or Stage Manager multitasking modes. It does not currently appear to be accessible when using the Full Screen apps option.

This kind of makes sense, since the goal of this mode is simplicity. I’ve seen family members accidentally pull up the Slide Over stack and have no idea what was going on.

To be honest though, I still there was an option to turn Full Screen apps mode into the multitasking we had before with Split View and Slide Over

Other Changes

There’s more to Beta 2 than just the return of Slide Over (although that’s interesting enough on its own).

Left-Aligned Settings Headers

The section headers in the Settings app have changed from being center-aligned to being left-aligned.

Gain Control for USB Microphones

Building on the system audio controls in iPadOS 26, Beta 2 adds gain control for USB microphones.

Download Menu Returns to Address Bar

In Beta 1, the Downloads window in Safari was strangely moved to the center of the screen. Beta 2 reverses this change.