iPadOS 26: Four & Five Finger App Switching Gesture Recognized Even If Setting Is Disabled
Please ask your colleagues if they play any rhythm games!!
I've seen this issue posted elsewhere but was closed by the community promising that they'd look into it and fix it. I wanted to provide some more context to the issue and how it impacts many of us today.
My iPad auto-updated to iPadOS26 this month and found out that the "Four & Five Finger App Switching" gesture in Multitasking & Gestures Settings isn't working correctly. I've had the feature disabled but that doesn't mean the gesture accompanying this setting isn't still active. The gesture is recognized and is cancelled as if the four fingers are no longer registering on the iPad screen. Before iPadOS 26, if this setting is disabled, the gesture would not be recognized and thus, the four-finger hold will not be cancelled.
While the bug is pretty niche, it really cuts deep into our leisure time and frustrates those who don't know the workaround, especially in rhythm games like Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage, Arcaea, Cytus II, and Phigros. Again, to anyone who works in Apple, please ask your colleagues if they play any rhythm games with their iPad and see if they are also experiencing the same issue.
Here's a video made by another rhythm gamer detailing the problem in action (plus a workaround for this bug):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tv9BSH7XXM
Device: iPad Air 13-inch (M2)
iPadOS Version: 26.2
iPad Air
