The simple split screen the iPad gave up now runs on a phone. The iPhone Duo's 7.6-inch inner display puts two apps side by side in iOS 27, a first for the iPhone, and 9to5Mac argues the setup beats anything iPadOS 27 offers on the similarly sized iPad mini.
Apple's own walkthrough, as MacRumors relays it, covers the basics: two apps or two Safari windows at once, Siri AI on one half while you read on the other, a swipe up from the bottom to switch apps, and saved pairs to come back to later. The details that make it feel easy come from 9to5Mac's piece: an app parked in half the screen leaves the full Home Screen visible for picking the second one, and a video can sit beside an app, which no iPad does.
The iPad used to have the simple version. The iPadOS 26 windowing overhaul replaced Split View and Slide Over with resizable, overlapping windows, and left two modes: all in on windows, or every app full screen. Slide Over came back in iPadOS 26.1, but as an option inside the window controls, so iPhoners who kept an iPad mini for quick side-by-side reading lost the easy version. iPadOS 27 keeps the all-or-nothing approach, per 9to5Mac, which calls windowing on the iPad mini far too convoluted for a screen that size.
iPad multitasking gets rebuilt more often than it gets finished. Here, the finished version shipped on the wrong device.
9to5Mac's pitch is that iPadOS is still iOS underneath, so bringing the Duo's system over shouldn't be a massive undertaking. That's a guess about Apple's code, but the saved pairs and the steady Home Screen already exist.
Anyone cross-shopping the iPhone Duo launch and an iPad mini can put multitasking in the phone's column.
