You may not love this if you’re hankering for iPadOS 16, but it gives Apple more time to get things right.
Per Bloomberg, Apple is planning to delay the release of its upcoming iPadOS 16 operating system by a month, pushing its launch to October. It’s thought that Apple is taking the extra time to improve its upcoming Stage Manager feature.
Stage Manager functions as a system that shows the most recent of your open apps on the left side of your iPad’s screen and allows you to click through them to make them the foreground app. Users can also drag over additional windows to work on multiple apps at the same time—a first for the iPad.
It’s unclear whether Apple plans major changes to Stage Manager between now and its release in October. iPadOS 16 is currently on its fourth developer beta and is also available to public beta testers. Thus far, testers have noted minor improvements to Stage Manager during the beta testing period.
During the beta test phase, the Stage Manager feature has drawn complaints from some developers and users for its bugs, a confusing interface and lack of compatibility with most iPads. The month-long delay will allow Apple to focus on perfecting this.
Bloomberg also notes that delaying iPadOS 16 by one month pushes its release closer to a new iPad Pro launch. Apple is prepping a new iPad Pro with an M2 chip inside. It will also mean that iPadOS 16 is released closer to, or at the same time as, macOS Ventura.
A fair amount of the Stage Manager complaints have centered on the fact that the feature is only available on iPads featuring an M1 chip.
Aside from Stage Manager, iPadOS 16 includes other new features such as iCloud Shared Photo Library, Messages improvements, proper external display support, Safari upgrades, and much more. Apple could have pulled Stage Manager from iPadOS 16 and delayed it separately, but instead it’s delaying the entire update.
In the past, Apple has sometimes separated the releases of its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. In 2019, iOS 13 was released to the public on September 19, while iPadOS 13 was released on September 24. In fact, the first version of iPadOS 13 that was released to everyone was technically iPadOS 13.1. iPadOS 13 itself was never released beyond developer and public beta testing.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.