iPadOS 26.1 beta brings back Slide Over, adds microphone adjustments
Monday’s second beta for iPadOS 26.1 includes two highly requested changes from iPad users (including us) that were absent in this summer’s iPadOS 26 beta cycle: a return of Slide Over and the addition of USB microphone gain control.
Slide Over is back
In throwing out iPadOS’s old multitasking interface, Apple also chucked out a simple multitasking feature that it turns out was maybe a bit more beloved than anyone expected. Slide Over, one of the iPad’s original “multitasking” features, let you stash a single window off to the side of your iPad, so you could work full-screen on different tasks and still have quick access to information in another app. As I wrote in my iPadOS 26 review:
The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)
In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, Slide Over is now an explicit part of the new multi-window multitasking view. To enable it, open a window and resize it so that the three “stoplight” buttons appear, tap and hold on the green one, and choose Add to Slide Over. Or choose Move to Left (or Right) Slide Over from the Window menu. Or type option-globe, left or right. All of those will work.
When Slide Over is invoked, the current window will be resized and stuck in the corner. You can grab the top of it and slide it off-screen, and it’ll vanish—only to reappear when you swipe your finger from off the side of the screen back on. You can stick the window on either side, and it’ll hang out there, regardless of whether you’re using full-screen windows or have a bunch of windows. You can even resize the Slide Over window when it’s on screen, and it’ll stay that size—unlike the old implementation.
Like Split View (which was reincarnated as two tiled side-by-side windows in multi-window mode), Slide Over only works in multi-window mode—but if you prefer to use your iPad apps at full size, you can just keep doing that even in multi-window mode. Nobody’s going to force you to make those windows smaller.
Slide Over only supports one app per display, so while you can only position one window on your main iPad display, if you use an external display, you can position a different app on that one.
Gain control for local capture
An issue with iPadOS 26’s new support for local recordings of camera and microphones was that you couldn’t adjust the gain on USB microphones, leading to some serious overmodulation on hot mics. In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, the local capture control in Control Center now includes a gain control. In our testing, this cured the issue involving the notoriously hot Audio-Technica ATR microphone popular with podcasters as a low-cost, portable option.
So in short: with its first major update to iPadOS 26, it appears that Apple has addressed two of the most glaring issues with its new feature list. I’m choosing to view that as a very encouraging sign.
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