iPadOS 16 coming this month: here’s when

While iOS 16 has been on our iPhone for a month now, we still have to wait for the big iPad update. When is the release of iPadOS 16? A reliable Apple insider thinks he knows.

Release iPadOS 16

iPadOS 16 will be released in October, Apple promised last month. The company did not mention a specific date, but according to reliable Apple insider Mark Gurman of Bloomberg we have to wait a little longer. iPadOS 16 was supposed to be released in the last week of October.

“iPadOS 16.1 is on track to be released the week of October 24, unless there are new bugs or issues,” Gurman said on Twitter. Earlier it became clear that version 16.0 will never find its way to the iPad. The first iPadOS 16 update will be 16.1.

Traditionally, Apple releases a new iOS at the same time as iPadOS, but this year it was different. The new Stage Manager feature that allows multiple apps to be used in overlapping windows was widely criticized in the test release. Apple decided to revise the feature, forcing the release of iPadOS 16 to be delayed.

One of the criticisms was that Stage Manager – arguably the biggest feature of iPadOS 16 – was only available for the latest iPad models with M1 processor. Now Apple has extended the feature to older iPad Pro models with an A12X or A12Z chip. These are iPad Pro models from 2018 and 2020.

Still having problems

The function has been further improved, but still works anything but flawless. Several users report that certain issues persist in the beta. Developer Steve Throughton-Smith lists them in a thread on Twitter. Stage Manager still seems decent buggywhile a release is getting close.

We’ve come to the end of the dev cycle, and Stage Manager is still forwarding events to apps that should be gobbled by the system — eg dragging a titlebar to move a window is still sending that drag event into the app itself too. It also conflicts with swipe to go back pic.twitter.com/TX0uUFkCAV

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) Oct 4, 2022

So iPadOS 16 will probably be released in the last week of October. iOS 16.1 will also be released for the iPhone, a relatively large interim update. You can read what’s new in an article about the latest iOS 16.1 beta.