iPadOS 18 forced a UI change to tab bars that was arguably worse for users and added extra work for developers who had no choice but to support it. No longer would it render along the bottom of the screen with icons and text side-by-side, but instead would be more akin to a segmented control at the top of the screen with no icons at all. This change happened as soon as you recompiled with Xcode 15 and could not be opted out of.

Tab bar differences between iPadOS 17 and 18 (screenshot from Nico Reese)

Apple’s goal with this redesign was to “provide more space for content and other functionality”. I’m not sure why the iPad with its massive screens would benefit from this more than the iPhone which did not get this change, but there are improvements when you consider the integrated search and the ability to animate from the segmented tab bar to a side bar navigation.

That said, I feel the overall change was negative as there were less visual affordances with the removal of icons¹ and long text is frequently truncated (i.e. from localisations). There are further reductions in the user experience when you consider that the tab bar position changes from the bottom of the screen² to the top of the screen as you switch between compact and regular size classes.

Fortunately, the design language of iOS 18 meant it was fairly easy for developers to create custom tab bars that looked like those on iOS 17.

Then, in the summer of 2025, Liquid Glass³ appeared…

A tab bar with Liquid Glass

Chromatic aberration! Real-time distortion! Bendy bubbles that react in real time to your swipes! These are all huge flexes for the Apple Silicon team but they suddenly make the idea of recreating the bottom iOS tab bar in iPadOS unrealistic as many of these design features are not available to developers.

The one “fix” I see regularly for this is to trick the tab bar into believing it is permanently running in compact mode (the size class that is used when you shrink iPad windows down to iPhone sizes):

// SwiftUI
TabView {
}
.environment(\.horizontalSizeClass, .compact)

// UIKit
tabBarController.traitOverrides.horizontalSizeClass = .compact

This works, to a point, but can lead to visual glitches in your navigation hierarchy. It also falls flat on iPadOS 26 as the tab bar is no longer full width but instead only as large as it needs to be; as the icon appears above the text in compact mode, this can lead to a very small tab bar on a 13” iPad Pro. This can be remedied by setting UIDesignRequiresCompatibility to YES in your Info.plist but this will disable Liquid Glass throughout your app and is only a stop-gap solution that is scheduled to be removed in iPadOS 27⁴.

Fortunately there is another way. With just a single line of code, you can get the traditional tab bar back on iPadOS 18 and an updated Liquid Glass version of it on iPadOS 26:

UserDefaults.standard.register(defaults: ["UseFloatingTabBar": false])

This works for both UIKit and SwiftUI apps, you just need to call it at the start of your application lifecycle.

The traditional iPad tab bar in Liquid Glass

All of the iOS 26 additions are supported such as the new search API seamlessly splitting the tab bar in half and allowing the search text field to appear at the bottom of the screen. This extends to other modern tab bar features such as tabBarMinimizeBehavior and tabViewBottomAccessory. This is not a hacky solution, but something Apple engineers have clearly put a lot of consideration into.

There are two caveats to this approach:

1. This is an internal flag within the system similar to defaults write on macOS. That means it is officially unsupported and could be removed in a future version of iPadOS but the risks are manageable. I have used it in several production apps since the launch of iPadOS 18 in 2024 and have never had any issues with App Review. The fact that they redesigned this component for Liquid Glass makes me fairly confident it won’t be removed anytime soon.

2. If your app is using UIKit storyboards and your initial view controller is a UITabBarController then simply registering the defaults in your App Delegate will not work because the storyboard will already be loaded. Instead, you’ll need to remove the automated way of having your storyboard load from Xcode and instead manually load it in the App Delegate by creating a UIWindow and assigning the initial view controller from your storyboard to it’s rootViewController property.

If you do go down this route, just be prepared that a future iPadOS update may remove the setting⁵ so it is best to make sure your app would still function without it enabled.

I think this tab bar looks and works a lot better than the segmented control approach we currently have and I wish Apple would support it fully by providing an explicit opt-in on UITabBarController / TabView. The Liquid Glass version of the traditional tab bar arguably does a better job of meeting Apple’s stated goal of providing more space for content while retaining the visual affordances that have been present in the tab bar for nearly two decades.