Apple has officially released iPadOS 26.4 for all iPadOS 26 users. This update has been in developer testing since the first beta was released about a month ago.

While this update brings both bug fixes and new features, the rumored and expected improvements to Siri have yet to surface (I feel like I’ve written this way too many times). Apple still has plenty of time to ship these features to meet its self-declared goal of shipping them in 2026.

Anywho, let’s go over what’s new in this update.

Video Version (made on very little sleep, apologies for any bugs!)

System Features

Open Window Indicator For Multitasking

iPadOS now displays a small notification just above an app’s Dock icon when you have windows open that might be obscured. As always, tapping on the icon again will open App Expose, which shows all of an application’s open windows.

New Emoji

This update adds a small set of new emoji: orca, trombone, ballet dancer, distorted face.

Accessibility: Reduce Bright Effects

This accessibility setting, located at Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Dim Flashing Lights, lets users tone down the bright flashes you can sometimes see when interacting with controls like buttons and sliders.

FWIW, when I went to demo this feature in my video, it randomly stopped working, so I didn’t include it. Could have just been a me thing, or this feature could be a bit buggy.

Ambient Music Widget

There’s now a homescreen widget for playing the Ambient Music playlists that are built into the system. You can access these playlists via Control Center (open Control Center > Tap the + button > search for “Ambient Music”).

Purchase Sharing No Longer Requires All Adults Use the Same Payment Method

This feature is a big one if you have multiple adults in a Family Sharing group. Each adult user can now use their own payment method for purchases, instead of having to all use the same payment method. Very handy.

App Features

One of my favorite apps on my Apple devices is the Music app. Not just because I love music (I do), but because this team seems be constantly and consistently cranking new features. The Music app is absolutely one of the better apps across iPadOS, iOS, and visionOS (macOS is weirdly an exception here, but there’s probably a lot of iTunes baggage there).

All that to say, the Music App got some nice new features in this release 🙂.

Playlist Playground (Beta) – AI Generated Playlists

Apple Music subscribers can take advantage of this Apple Intelligence feature that can generate a playlist based on text prompts. Playlist names and descriptions are automatically generated as well.

Full Screen Backgrounds for Album and Playlist Pages

Many Apple Music album and playlist views now have a new, more immersive look and feel.

Nearby Concert Information

The Music app can surface nearby concert information for artists in your music library and recommend new artists based on your listening history.

Compact Tab Bar in Safari

The compact tab option makes a triumphant return for those users (like me) that enjoyed using it on some devices. I found it especially nice on space constrained devices like the iPad Mini.

It has been slightly redesigned from its iPadOS 18 appearance, but the functionality is essentially the same. Tapping on a new tab expands it, so that it’s easier to enter a search query or configure an extension, then it shrinks back down to its more compact form.

Freeform Joins Apple Creator Studio

As promised in the initial press release for Apple Creator Studio, Freeform gets updated to officially become part of Apple’s subscription offering. The app itself is still free to use for all users with the majority of its feature set available to all. Like Keynote, Numbers, and Pages before it, Freeform now has “premium” content that is gated behind the Creator Studio subscription.

Subscribers can also leverage models from OpenAI to generate image content for your Freeform boards.

It’s important to call out that everything you’ve been able to use in the Freeform app remains free, even with the move into Apple’s subscription. At this time, it is only the new “premium” content and AI features that are behind the paywall.

It also gets a new Creator Studio themed icon, which for my money, is one of the better ones of these icons.

Enhanced Video Support for Podcasts

Apple announced back in February that an improved video podcast experience was coming to Apple Podcasts, and with iPadOS 26.4, it has finally arrived.

Apple Podcasts has long supported video in the podcasts, but with its new support of HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) technology, users will be able to seamlessly switch between video and audio versions of an episode, if offered.

Creators will even gain an additional monetization avenue by being able to dynamically insert video ads. Apple stands to increase their services revenue by charging ad networks that integrate with this feature at some point in the future.

Bug Fixes

It’s not uncommon for a major point update to include a slew of security fixes, and iPadOS 26.4 is no exception.

This update fixes 35 vulnerabilities across the system, ranging from addressing a WebKit vulnerability that allows malicious web content to break through the Safari sandbox, to fixing a kernel flaw that could allow an app to corrupt kernel memory.