Apple announces iPadOS 15 with home screen and multitasking improvements

Apple today announced iOS 15 with improvements to FaceTime, notifications, and a bunch of other apps like Photos. As usual, the firm also announced a few new iPad-specific features with iPadOS 15. These include home screen improvements, multitasking additions, and more.

Possibly the biggest improvement is that widgets can now be placed anywhere on the iPad's home screen, leveraging the larger screen real estate for additional widgets that come in larger sizes. There are new widgets for Photos, Gaming, and more.

Additionally, the App Library feature from iOS 14 is making its way to iPadOS, bringing the ability to hide the home screen and move all apps to the library, which is now situated in the dock. This helps reduce clutter on the iPad home screen, greatly improving the users' experience.

Another major (and welcome) improvement is coming to multitasking features. iPadOS 15 now displays a window control at the top of the screen that allows users to switch to a split view that places two apps side-by-side. When in split view, users can add instances of an app over the current apps and then minimize it to the bottom to an area called the "Shelf".

Notes is also getting a few new features such as @ mentions that can intimate users when they are linked to a new. A new activity view shows users the changes to a note to ascertain what change was made when and who made it. The firm is also introducing Quick Note, a way to quickly access Notes across the OS using an Apple Pencil. Users can also link to websites inside these notes and the app will remember website-specific notes when paired with Safari.

Another nifty addition is Auto Translate, a feature in the Translate app that automatically translates speech. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are also receiving system-wide translation to help users translate images and text across the OS.

Other enhancements such as FaceTime improvements, revamped notification designs, and new Focus modes, SharePlay to share content via FaceTime, and other features introduced with iOS 15 will also be available for iPad customers. The first iPadOS 15 developer beta is now available for registered developers.