iPadOS 16 is ‘on its own schedule,’ shipping after iOS 16 this year

Photo by David Pierce / The Verge

The public release of iPadOS 16.0 won't happen until after Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, starts hitting phones, according to Apple. We have the flexibility to deliver iPadOS on its own schedule. iPadOS will be released in a free software update this fall.

Since Apple split the iPad's operating system into two separate entities, it has always felt like this was a possibility. The first version of iPadOS was released less than a week after the launch of Apple's new operating system. It's a big change of pace for Apple, as the company has made a habit of delaying individual features from its mobile OSes, but skipping the initial version.

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iPadOS 16 preview: jack of all trades, master of some

The report that Mark Gurman released earlier this month is confirmed by this news. The developer site doesn't seem to have any release notes for the latest version of the software. The company is releasing a new build of the operating system for developers, but it is not as good as the previous one.

The initial version of iPadOS won't be released by Apple until later. The Stage Manager multitasking system, which is the flagship feature of the upcoming OS, feels very underbaked according to many people on the alpha stage. When my colleague David Pierce was previewing the OS, he said he hated Stage Manager, and a prominent iPad user recently urged Apple to delay the feature, saying he experienced crashes "every few minutes" andUI glitch everywhere. Some parts of the feature's design arefundamentally misguided, according to him.

The fact that going back to classic Split View and Slide Over feels *so* nice right now is...pretty telling.



If Stage Manager is the future of iPadOS for pro users, I hope Apple understands that it can't be rushed. We waited years for this; might as well get it in Spring 2023.

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) August 18, 2022

It sounds like iPadOS isn't ready for prime time, but that could cause some weird behavior for iPad users who upgrade toiOS 16 for their phones. Messages will show up differently on an iPad, based on the system's behavior in thebetas, and it's hard to say for sure how iPadOS will handle things like iCloud shared photo libraries. I can tell you that it can be hard to get used to features on one device and then not have them on another that runs the same OS. I think I will get frustrated after forgetting that my iPad doesn't support PassKeys.

The question of what will happen with macOS Ventura is raised by the delay of iPadOS. It is easier to ignore the Mac than it is to update the desktop OS.

If the OS release isn't finished, it's a good idea to push it back. The wait is just a bit longer since Apple hasn't given an actual date for when iPadOS will be coming out.