My iPad has a keyboard so I stick with Command+Tab to switch apps.
Most modern UX has too much wasted space but Stage Manager is in the upper 75% of wasted space. Just give us macOS on M-Series iPads. Now that would truly be courageous.
Actually… I have to confess I’ve been using SM for the past week or two on the iPad. Someone posted that you could fill the screen with apps and the SM ‘area’ would vanish off on the left, to be brought forward with a swipe from the left edge. I’ve been giving that a go, and the three finger trackpad swipe a lot of late.
Quite often in Apple v1 of a feature is easily dismissed and the feature becomes actually useful much lager.
Late to the party… (and even later since the email version bounced fatally)
I was expecting to use Stage Manager on an ipad air 5 last autumn so I could work more conveniently with goodnotes and the motic wi-fi microscope app which doesn’t support split view or slide over multitasking. But life happened and I wasn’t using the motic as often so never got around to trying it.
Sat down with the ipad manual (gone are the days of easy discoverability) earlier today, and played with all the different multitasking things. I mostly liked Stage Manager once I found the control center on/off and turned off the recent apps and dock space hogs and will probably use it at least occasionally. The main thing I don’t like is that resizing windows isn’t continuous. There are several set sizes that you can change between, but you can’t make a window be sized just right, e.g. for a particular pdf in goodreader. It would be better on a much bigger iPad (I really want a 15"), but since my main uses in the near future would be frequent switching and drag & drop between several apps rather than needing to view 2 or more simultaneously, it’s fine.
For Mac, I don’t have anything that can run SM, but I doubt I’d ever use it there because what I do have is decades of tuning the way I do things (aka slightly structured chaos); I can’t see any reason to upset that banana cart.
I actually kind of love SM on my 11" iPad Pro, when used with a keyboard.
Getting things in and out of a SM “set” is a pain, and there are certainly bugs especially related to the various floaring keyboard palletes, but actually having access to the 2 or 3 windows that I need for a particular task is very useful to me. For writing, I can have my main app like Ulysses alongside an outliner and a browser window for lookups, which is just what I need to have at hand.
Looking forward to the improvements in iPadOS 17…