Anil Dash recently made an observation on Mastodon that included a screenshot of an iPadOS 26 setup screen with a prompt showing three options: Full Screen Apps, Windowed Apps, and Stage Manager. While each option had a description, Stage Manager curiously was the only one that ended with “more…” As someone who has written quite a bit about Stage Manager’s lacking lexicon, that “more” was like catnip. I had to see what exactly the “more” linked to. After all, it had been over three years and iPadOS versions since I was pissing and moaning about the lack of coherent terminology, and maybe this “more” would bring me somewhere full of nouns that aptly describe the pieces that make up a Stage Manager. I didn’t have an iPad anymore, but had surmised and later confirmed that “more” linked to the “Organize windows with Stage Manager on iPad” article in the iPad User Guide.
Having now read that article, I can now confirm that the situation with Stage Manager’s terminology remains a complete mess, but the “Organize apps into groups in Stage Manager” in particular section highlights a more fundamental lexical problem I hadn’t fully recognized in my earlier writing: a lack of distinction between apps and windows.
Organize apps into groups in Stage Manager
You can create groups of windows for specific tasks or projects by dragging app windows from the recent apps list into the center of the screen. You can also drag app icons from the Dock into the center of the screen to add them to a group.
You can return a window to the recent apps list by dragging it to the left. If you minimize a window in an app group, the app window is removed from the group and returned to the recent apps list.
Right from the get-go, we have a header that begins with “organize apps in groups” followed immediately by a sentence that reads “you can create groups of windows.” That’s bad, but it doesn’t hold a candle to that section’s pièce de résistance of incoherence that is its last sentence.
If you minimize a window in an app group, the app window is removed from the group and returned to the recent apps list.
While the writing could be improved, the greatest technical writers in the world could only do so much when Apple itself seemingly can’t agree on whether the things Stage Manager manages are “apps” or “windows” (or comedy option three: “app windows”.) The problem extends beyond Stage Manager into the new Windowed Apps mode in iPadOS 26, which has a single list of instructions to “Resize a window”, “Move a window”, and “Manage an app window”. Why can’t they all just use “window”?
My guess as to why this section incoherently conflates apps and windows is related to Apple’s historical reluctance to embrace anything deemed too computer-y in iPadOS prior to Stage Manager. The reasoning goes like this: people love iPads because they not like computers and computers have windows, ergo the iPad can’t have windows. The iOS 9 press release when Apple first introduced iPad multitasking with split view and slide over does not contain the word “window” nor any derivation of it. This “windows are bad” mentality wasn’t just coming from Apple. It was also largely echoed by iPad enthusiasts of the time. Here’s an excerpt from Federico Viticci’s iOS 9 review of the then new mechanisms:
Split View isn’t like window management on a desktop: Apple wanted to eschew the complexities of traditional PC multitasking and windowing systems, and by rethinking the entire concept around size classes and direct touch manipulation, they’ve largely achieved this goal. They have created new complexities specific to iOS and touch, but it’s undeniable that Slide Over and Split View are far from the annoyances inherent to window management on OS X. The iPad is fighting to be a computer and Split View epitomizes this desire, but it doesn’t want to inherit the worst parts of multitasking from desktop computers.
By the time multitasking was revamped for iPadOS 15, the word “windows” could not be avoided. It was however mentioned only once.
Users now have quick access to the Home Screen when using Split View, and using the new shelf, they can also multitask with apps that have multiple windows like Safari and Pages.
This is a great example of why it’s so foolish to avoid the word “windows”. Not only is “apps that have multiple windows” easy and accurate, it also doesn’t require any additional explanation because anyone interested in multitasking on iPadOS already knows what a window is. I’m not arguing Apple should always use “windows” in place of “apps”. No one would ever need to distinguish between apps and hypothetical full-screen windows in iOS because they’d be functionally one in the same. The most recent iPad OS 18 documentation for Split View actually does a good job delineating when to use one verses the other.
On iPad, you can work with multiple apps at the same time. Open two different apps, or two windows from the same app, by splitting the screen into resizable views.
Using “apps” is fine when apps are one-to-one with windows. I’d argue the same is colloquially true even in macOS. “Go to Safari” is a clear instruction when there is only one Safari window open. That said, “windows” becomes unavoidable the instant an app has more than one.
This brings me back to that paragraph from Stage Manager’s documentation. Unlike Split-View, Stage Manager is very clearly a window manager. Every app is represented by one or multiple windows. Here’s the same documentation with a few changes1 that embrace this reality.
Organize windows into groups in Stage Manager
You can create groups of windows from multiple apps for specific tasks or projects by dragging them from the recents list into the center of the screen. You can also add windows to a group by dragging app icons from the Dock into the center of the screen.
You can return a window to the recents list by dragging it to the left. If you minimize a window in any group, the window is removed from that group and returned to the recents list.
While far from perfect (that second paragraph in particular), describing how Stage Manager groups windows is far more coherent and accurate because that’s what Stage Manager actually does. Stage Manager still needs a better lexicon across the board, but a good start would be to finally let windows be windows.