It seems like Apple went into this morning’s keynote at WWDC with the mindset of killing Google’s developer conference just a couple short weeks ago. With the iOS 9 announcement, Apple made some pretty big changes. Including bringing true multi-tasking to the iPad. This is something that Samsung has had for quite a while, dating back to the first Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet a few years ago.
One of the features is Split View, which allows you to have two apps running side by side. You can actually interact with both apps at the same time. On Samsung’s devices, you can only scroll through one app at a time. Which normally isn’t a big deal though. Split View is only coming to the iPad Air 2, however.
There’s also picture in picture. The example that Apple used was watching SportsCenter in the ESPN app, and then checking your email. So now you can keep that video going on your screen while you read your email and reply to your boss. In fact, you can even slide it to the edge of the screen and just listen to the video. As expected, you are also able to move the video around, to wherever you want it to be. Picture in Picture will be available for the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2, and iPad Mini 3.
Finally there’s the ability to double tap the home button and view a carousel of apps that are open. That isn’t really new to iOS though. Now you can also swipe in to bring in a new app. A good example of that is the Messages app. Where you can just bring in the Messages app and reply to a message that was sent to you, or send off a quick message. This will also be available for the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2, and iPad Mini 3.
So Apple has multi-tasking now in iOS 9. Dual-window multi-tasking at that. Something we’ve been asking for on Android for quite sometime. Hopefully now Google got the message and we’ll get it in Android M or perhaps Android N next year.