How to Split Screen on iPad When the Option Isn't There

You have found the tutorial, you have followed it to the letter, and it keeps telling you to tap the three dots at the top of the screen and pick Split View. There are no three dots on your iPad. Or there are, and Split View is not one of the choices. Nothing is broken and you have not missed a gesture.

If you are looking up how to split screen on iPad in 2026, the short answer is that it stopped being a gesture and became a setting. Apple rebuilt iPad multitasking in iPadOS 26, and most of the guides sitting on page one were written before that happened. When I checked those results, Apple's own support page described a system called Windowed Apps and never used the phrase Split View at all, while five of the pages beneath it still walked through the old three-dot menu. Both are describing real iPads. They are describing different ones.

How to split screen on iPad: the short version

Open Settings, tap Multitasking and Gestures, then choose Windowed Apps. That path comes straight from Apple's iPadOS 26 multitasking page. With that mode on, open one app and drag a second one out of the Dock, App Library or Spotlight to, in Apple's words, "the left- or right-hand edge of the screen". The two sit side by side, and you resize either one by dragging the handle in its bottom-right corner, so they do not have to be equal halves.

If Multitasking and Gestures is set to Full Screen Apps instead, no gesture will work, because that mode has no side-by-side layout at all. Change the setting first, then follow whichever tutorial you like. That one check accounts for most of the "split screen has disappeared" posts filling Apple's own discussion forums.

iPadOS 26 turned iPad multitasking into a choice

Until iPadOS 26 there was one way an iPad behaved, with a few gestures layered on top. Now there are three modes and you pick one. That is why two people holding identical iPads can follow the same instructions and get different results.

Full Screen Apps

One app fills the screen and stays there. No Split View, no Slide Over, no windows of any kind. It is the calmest of the three modes and it is the single most likely reason the feature looks like it has been taken away from you.

Windowed Apps

This is the mode you want for side by side. Apps still open full screen, so it does not feel like a Mac until you ask it to, and you resize a window from the handle in its bottom-right corner. You also get Mac-style window controls: as MacRumors sets out in its iPadOS 26 multitasking walkthrough, red closes a window, green takes it full screen and yellow drops it down to the Dock.

There is a side effect worth knowing about. In Windowed Apps mode, iPhone-only apps open in a floating window shaped like an iPhone rather than a stretched, letterboxed version of themselves. If you rely on an app that has never bothered with a proper iPad layout, this mode alone makes it usable.

Stage Manager

Stage Manager now sits on top of Windowed Apps rather than competing with it. It groups windows into stages that you switch between, which pays off if you run the same three or four apps together every day and gets in the way if you do not.

Four ways to get two apps side by side

Once you are in Windowed Apps or Stage Manager, there is more than one route. Use whichever fits what your hands are already doing.

• Drag an app out of the Dock, App Library or Spotlight onto the left or right edge of the screen.
• Flick one window quickly to one side, then flick the next window to the other side.
• Press and hold the green window control to get tiling layouts, including three and four windows at once.
• Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold to see everything that is open, then pick your second app from there.

Slide Over went away, then came back smaller

Slide Over, the floating panel that had been on iPads since 2015, did not survive the rebuild either. Gizmodo's writer was told at WWDC that Windowed Apps was the better replacement, and then reported its return in iPadOS 26.1 on 3 November 2025, a little over a month after it vanished.

To use it now, press and hold the window controls in the top-left corner of an app and choose Enter Slide Over. One thing did not come back with it. You get a single floating window, not the carousel of several apps you could flick between. If that carousel is what you have been hunting for in the settings, you can stop.

Which guide is right for your iPad

Before you trust anything written about this, including this article, check Settings, then General, then Software Update, and see which version you are actually on. The advice splits cleanly in two.

On iPadOS 18 and earlier, the three-dot menu at the top of an app is real, and Split View and Slide Over are named features you turn on from it. Those older tutorials are not wrong, they are simply out of date for anyone who has updated. On iPadOS 26 and later, the three dots have gone, window controls have taken their place, and the mode you picked in Multitasking and Gestures decides what is possible at all.

Every iPad on iPadOS 26 can do this. Not all of them keep it

Windowing on the iPad used to be fenced off behind newer chips, which is part of why it never caught on. On iPadOS 26 all three modes are available right across the supported range, back as far as the first 11-inch iPad Pro, the third-generation iPad Air, the fifth-generation iPad mini and the eighth-generation iPad.

iPadOS 27 was announced at WWDC in June 2026 and ships this month, and its compatibility list is shorter: at least the fifth-generation iPad mini and the eighth-generation iPad fall off it. Setting the two lists side by side myself, that means those models get exactly one release of proper windowed multitasking and no more. They keep what they already have. They do not get the faster window handling Apple has put into 27.

If that pushes you towards a replacement, I have written up where the UK iPad price rise actually landed and what Apple still has to launch this year, including a new iPad mini. The wider Mac and iPad price increase is worth reading first if you are budgeting for one.

Questions people ask about iPad split screen

Why has Split View disappeared from my iPad?

Almost certainly because Multitasking and Gestures is set to Full Screen Apps, a mode that has no side-by-side layout in it. Switch it to Windowed Apps and the behaviour comes back. Nothing has been removed from your particular iPad.

Can an older iPad use windowed apps?

Yes, as long as it runs iPadOS 26. All three modes reach back to the first 11-inch iPad Pro, the third-generation iPad Air, the fifth-generation iPad mini and the eighth-generation iPad. The catch is iPadOS 27, which drops the oldest of those.

Is Slide Over gone for good?

No. It returned in iPadOS 26.1, but as one floating window rather than the stack of apps you could cycle through. Press and hold the window controls and choose Enter Slide Over.

My take

Apple made the iPad more capable here and, for one release, far less obvious. The word everyone types into Google, Split View, is not in Settings under that name any more, so the software and the search results drifted apart and have stayed apart for a year.

Set Multitasking and Gestures to Windowed Apps, spend five minutes flicking windows into the edges, and you get everything the old Split View did plus tiling for three and four apps. If you truly only ever use one thing at a time, Full Screen Apps is a fair choice and I would not talk you out of it. Just remember that you chose it, because that setting is what makes every tutorial on the internet look broken.

Source: Multitask on iPad with iPadOS 26, Apple Support