On iOS 26 (26.0–26.5), a rectangular region in the lower half of the screen sometimes does not render while the content underneath remains laid out and interactive — scrolling works, hit testing succeeds, and rows visibly emerge from behind the floating tab bar as you scroll. This is a render-server / compositor gap, not a layout or safe-area issue.
We see it on both UIKit and SwiftUI scroll surfaces inside the same UITabBarController:
UIKit: UICollectionView with UICollectionViewFlowLayout (sectionInsetReference = .fromSafeArea)
SwiftUI: List(.plain) nested in TabView(.page) inside a UIHostingController
Confirmed on iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max. Community threads (linked below) report the same symptom in Messages, Notes, Safari, Mail, and the App Store.
Questions for Apple
Is this acknowledged as an OS-level regression, and is a fix targeted for an upcoming iOS 26.x release?
Is there a deterministic repro? We've tried background/foreground cycles, push notifications mid-scroll, tab switches during inertia, lock/unlock, orientation flips, simulated memory warnings, layout-invalidation storms, and trait-collection cycles — none reliably trigger it on our test devices.
Is there a developer-side mitigation (e.g. avoiding specific UIVisualEffectView / Glass configurations, opting out of a rendering optimization) until a system fix lands?
Is there a runtime signal on CALayer or UIScrollView we can inspect to detect this gap state and force a recovery (tile redraw, backing-store discard, etc.)?
Notes
We cannot reproduce locally. Affected users hit it organically; once it appears it persists across re-layout until the view controller is torn down.
Community reports consistently mention Reduce Transparency being enabled on affected devices, and toggling it off clears the issue for many. In our own testing, RT alone is not sufficient to trigger the bug — it appears to be a contributing condition rather than the trigger.
References:
Apple Discussions: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256182149
Reddit r/ios (multiple system apps): https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1nlzn7f/some_apps_cutting_off_half_the_display/
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/03/23/webpage-content-cutting-off-safari/
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