How to detect "Full Screen Apps" vs "Windowed Apps" multitasking?

Question

Created 2w

Replies 4

Boosts 0

Participants 2

I have an iPad app that supports multiple scenes.

I discovered some issues with my app's user interface that I would like to tweak based on whether the user has setup multitasking (in iPadOS 26) as "Full Screen Apps" or "Windowed Apps".

Is there any API or way to determine the current iPadOS 26 multitasking setting?

I've looked at UIDevice.current.isMultitaskingSupported and UIApplication.shared.supportsMultipleScenes. Both always return true no matter the user's chosen multitasking choice.

I also looked at UIWindowScene isFullScreen which was always false. I tried to look at UIWindowScene windowingBehaviors but that was always nil.

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Answer 1

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

2w

There is intentionally no means to determine which mode you are in, but perhaps there is a way to resolve the issues you are seeing directly? Could you describe what problems you see?

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Answer 2

RickMaddy OP

2w

There's no macOS-like menu bar when the user chooses "Full Screen Apps". I didn't know this and some of my app's functionality can only be accessed through the main menu bar. So I was thinking I could show some alternative way to access those features when in that mode.
iPadOS has supported the ability to open a new scheme through drag and drop using UIDragItem and NSItemProvider and dragging it to the edge of the screen. When a user chooses "Full Screen Apps", this no longer works for opening a new scene. I'd like to disable the drag and drop if it's not going to actually do anything.

Those are two main things I can think of so far that depend on the user's choice of multitasking mode.

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Answer 3

Frameworks Engineer OP

Apple

2w

For #1 I think our recommendation would be to never rely on the main menu bar existing but I can certainly see challenges in building a UI that way at times!

For #2 that sounds buggy to me but I don't know for sure. If nothing else it would probably make good feedback, since I would hope that we would behave consistently in this respect regardless of modes.

I'll ping some folks and see if there is any additional insight they can provide here.

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Answer 4

RickMaddy OP

2w

Thanks. I'll adjust my UI for the iPad so the main menu isn't required.

In the next day I'll work on filing a bug report about #2. A user can still open a second scene using the "New Window" context menu from the app's icon on the home screen, but a new scene can't be created the old way as I described earlier. And there's no way to know with the current API so it leaves the user wondering what this "useless drag feature" is for.

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