The floating tab bar indeed doesn't respond to .tabBars. Checking is the code is being run on iPad with ipadOS 18, and using .buttons instead, worked for me, e.g.: var iOS18available = false if #available(iOS 18, *) { iOS18available = true } let isIPadIOS18 = iOS18available && UIDevice.current.model.lowercased().contains("ipad") let firstTab = isIPadIOS18 ? app.buttons["First tab button title"] : app.tabBars.buttons.element(boundBy: 0) firstTab.tap() Also see: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/759960

EDIT: inconsistent results

I had this issue after a change in the model. In my case, removing the app and re-installing did the trick.

The 'async' in the accepted answer did it for me. I changed from context.performAndWait({ delete action }) to await context.perform({ delete action }). and this fixed it for me.