Leading up to the announcement of the iPhone Duo, I naively thought the device’s inner display would “run” iPadOS (spoiler: iPadOS and iOS are the same thing) and Apple would call it a day.

But, true to form, the company chose to take a fresh look at how multitasking should work on an iPhone with a folding display. In the process, they came up with some tweaks to Split View from iPadOS that I hope the iPad adopts sooner rather than later.

App Pairings

On the iPhone Duo, apps that are in Split View can be paired together in a group by tapping the divider between them. This lets you quickly get back to that pairing through the App Switcher.

iOS 11 on the iPad had a very similar feature, where apps in Split View would preserve their pairings and let you quickly jump back to them.

Quickly Swapping Sides

On the iPhone Duo, using the home indicator at the bottom of the screen, you can quickly drag apps from one side to the other.

With the previous version of iPadOS multitasking (iPadOS 18 and older), you could quickly drag an app in Split View to the other side of a split using the multitasking menu (three dots at the top of each window).

Video Split View in Portrait

If you’re watching a video in Picture-in-Picture while the Duo is in portrait orientation, you can quickly create a vertical split with the video on the top half and another app on the bottom.

We’ve never really had anything like this on iPad, but it feels much less necessary given how much more screen real estate there is. You could just make the PiP window bigger or create a normal vertical split using the multitasking buttons.

Hoping for a “Back to the iPad” OS Release

One of the things Apple does really well is take the learnings it gains on one product and apply them to others. The same way the iPad informed some of the experiences on the iPhone Duo, I hope Apple can add these neat multitasking tricks to iPadOS 28.