This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
Look, we get it — floating windows! iPadOS 26 has been officially unveiled and Apple really wants you to know that now, finally, your iPad can pretend it’s a MacBook with commitment issues. Apps can hover, glide, resize, and generally float around your screen like a PowerPoint presentation that took too many espresso shots. It’s the future! It’s dynamic! It’s... fine.
But let’s be honest: most of us aren’t clamoring to open seven apps at once and juggle them like a caffeinated octopus, especially on an 11-inch screen. There’s a certain zen to the old iPad experience: one app, one task, one focus. It’s like digital meditation — unless you count the occasional rage when you tap on a notification while exporting a video at 87% and the export just STOPS. Floating windows are cool, but you know what’s cooler?
Actually being able to switch apps while rendering a video without everything dying a fiery death.
Yes, friends. The real hero of iPadOS 26 isn’t hovering interface elements — it’s the long-overdue ability to perform heavy background tasks without turning your iPad into a glorified clipboard.
Remember the old days? You’d be editing a podcast in Ferrite, exporting a 4K video in LumaFusion, or batch-processing RAW files in Pixelmator, and dare to check your email — poof! Everything stopped. Your iPad, a $2,000 slab of M-series silicon, would politely inform you that multitasking was a suggestion, not a promise. Want to browse Reddit while rendering a timeline? Enjoy restarting the export when you get back.
Not anymore.
In iPadOS 26, your background tasks will keep running even when you switch apps. Rendering, exporting, uploading — they keep going, like your hopes and dreams when you first bought the iPad Pro. What a wild concept for a product that has “Pro” in its name, right? You can finally edit a video, export it, answer Slack messages, doomscroll Twitter, and still return to a finished render.
Apple didn’t shout about this from the rooftops, but they should have. Because this is the update that transforms the iPad from “good enough if you squint and accept compromises” to a legitimate creative tool that doesn’t punish you for having the attention span of a modern human.
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I’ll still keep using it in single-app mode for most of the time. I enjoy the digital zen. But being able to swipe away from that video project to just check what the Facebook algorithm wants to stuff down my lizard brain? I’ll take it!
And as I already said in the WWDC 2025 recap video — my colleagues will finally stop making fun of me for actually working off an iPad!
Preslav, a member of the PhoneArena team since 2014, is a mobile technology enthusiast with a penchant for integrating tech into his hobbies and work. Whether it's writing articles on an iPad Pro, recording band rehearsals with multiple phones, or exploring the potential of mobile gaming through services like GeForce Now and Steam Link, Preslav's approach is hands-on and innovative. His balanced perspective allows him to appreciate both Android and iOS ecosystems, focusing on performance, camera quality, and user experience over brand loyalty.
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