I also had the same issue. Some observations:
When I added the dummy tabbar item (so that there are 5 tabbar items) then it seems fine. The number of tabbar item didn't change to 6.
I moved the populating viewControllers array logic to viewDidAppear, it seems working alright. (previously it was it viewDidLoad).
Topic:
UI Frameworks
SubTopic:
UIKit
Tags: