We’ve been using hidesBottomBarWhenPushed for a long time specifically to hide the tab bar, and many developers and companies rely on this behavior to hide the tab bar when pushing view controllers. This has become one of the top issues in communities like StackOverflow, as the behavior appears to be broken in iOS 26. If hidesBottomBarWhenPushed no longer hides the tab bar in iOS 26, it would mean we have to redesign and fix the layout of every affected screen currently in production. Therefore, we either need hidesBottomBarWhenPushed to continue working as it did, or Apple needs to provide a new recommended approach for hiding the tab bar when pushing a view controller.

While testing further on iOS 26, I noticed another issue when using hidesBottomBarWhenPushed = true. When I push a view controller with this property enabled and then navigate back, the pushed view controller’s deinit() is not called. Additionally, the navigation bar does not properly reset — for example, the rightBarButtonItem set in the pushed view controller remains visible even after returning to the previous screen (e.g., the Home tab). It seems likely that because deinit() is not called, the pushed controller is not fully removed from memory, which may explain why its navigationItem is still affecting the navigation bar after popping. This behavior disappears when I comment out hidesBottomBarWhenPushed = true.

Just wanted to follow up — I’ve tested again on Beta 3, and unfortunately, the issue still hasn’t been resolved. Would appreciate any updates or confirmation on whether a fix is being tracked.