Wondering what’s the difference between Stage Manager and windowed apps in iPadOS 26 on iPad? It’s actually quite simple.
Windowed Apps and Stage Manager Might Look the Same but the Latter is Meant to Enhance Productivity
At this point, it’s clear as day that Apple is bringing a new windowing system to iPad, allowing users to open up any number of apps they want on the screen.
A similar feature, Stage Manager, has been around for quite some time now, and that too is coming to every single iPad model with iPadOS 26 – I’ve talked about this before as well.
But, what exactly is the difference between windowed apps and Stage Manager?
There’s one huge difference, and one only.
Stage Manager allows you to create a custom stack of apps which you can access at any given time.
For example, you can have Messages, Pages, and maybe the Safari apps together. And, you can have a dedicated space for your social media apps such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and more.
These stacks can be accessed from the left of the display. And the moment you tap or click on them, those groups of apps will become visible on the screen, exactly in the order how you placed them before.
With windowed apps, everything is limited to just a single space, but you can have an unlimited number of apps on top of each other.
The funny thing is, since iPadOS 26 allows unlimited apps to be open at the same time, this also means you can flood a space in Stage Manager with a ton of apps, and if you’re running out of room on the screen, just create a new space.
Wrap Up
So, the difference is simple – windowed apps are limited to a single space, while Stage Manager allows you to create dedicated spaces for apps of your choice.
Although a lot of people are going to stick with full-screen apps, Stage Manager comes in handy if you want to be more productive and focus on a certain number of apps for a given task.
With the new windowing system in place, Stage Manager benefits from it greatly. And at the same time, Apple is bringing it to every single iPad model you can imagine.
