iOS 9 multitasking explained. Split View vs Slide Over: what's the difference and should you care?

When Apple announced iOS 9 a few months ago, we were happy to hear about the new multitasking functionality – picture-in-picture, Split View, and Slide Over. Indeed, while Android devices have had such features for quite a while, Apple's devices were lagging a bit behind, and it was nice to see that the iPads may get some extended functionality. But wait, let's start from the top.

Slide Over and Split View – what are they and how are they different?

Split View and Slide Over are iOS 9's answer to the demand for multitasking on mobile devices. They both look very similar – you just swipe in from the right of the screen and you get a second overlay, which can launch a number of secondary apps, without you having to leave the app you've been working on. You may have heard, however, that Split View is only available for the iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4, and iPad Pro, while Slide Over is also supported on older devices – namely, the iPad Air, iPad mini 2, and iPad mini 3. So, is it worth getting the newest and best from Apple just for Split View, or would Slide Over do the job just fine?

Slide Over

First things first, Slide Over is merely meant as a peek-in-peek-out type function. Let's say you want to start a Facebook chat without leaving Safari. You swipe in from the right and scroll through all the apps available in the Slide Over menu. When you pick Messenger, it loads in that small patch of screen space it has been given. When done with the new app, tapping anywhere outside the Slide Over tray will close it and let you resume your work. So, the whole feature looks like an extended variant of the actionable notifications – you can check and reply to chats, have a quick peek at your schedule or add an event to the calendar, have a quick glimpse at your photo and video albums, et cetera, and then quickly return to whatever you were doing beforehand.

It's definitely a useful feature and those of you who spend a lot of time on the iPad will love it. Unfortunately, opening apps in the Slide Over tray is a bit of a tedious process right now, as it involves scrolling through a long column of all the available ones. Finding your most recently used apps is easy, as they get moved to the list's starting point, but this also means that there is absolutely no order to how apps are arranged further down the line. And the apps aren't even that many – just most of the stock iOS ones, and a few ones that have already been updated to support the new feature. We hope Apple gives us an option to sort said app list when more and more developers make theirs Slide Over-capable, because we can see it getting overcrowded pretty fast, which would render the multitasking feature useless – it will be much faster to press Home, find and use your desired app, then get back to what you were doing, instead of having to shuffle through an endless list of icons.

It's important to note that Slide Over can be pulled over any and all apps – independent of whether the developer has updated the compatibility on their app of not. This will come up again later, as we talk about Split View.

All in all, Slide Over is for quick glimpses and actions, don't expect to stream a video clip on one side of the screen, while reading forums on the other.