iOS 26 TabBar Remove Selected Capsule

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I have subclassed UITabBar and created a custom look and feel for it. On iOS 18, the tab bar appears as expected. On iOS 26, however, a default Liquid Glass-style capsule selection indicator appears behind the selected tab item.

I tried using UITabBarAppearance, including selectionIndicatorTintColor = .clear and selectionIndicatorImage = nil / empty image, but the capsule-style selected background still appears.

Is this selection treatment part of the new default system rendering in iOS 26, and if so, is there any supported way to remove or disable it while still using UITabBar?

Screenshot 2026-04-03 at 10.56.05 AM.png

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DTS Engineer OP

Apple

1h

Thanks for the post. Any chance you can provide a simple focused project we can download and run it to see what you are seeing?

If so, please share a link to your test project. That'll help us better understand what's going on. If you're not familiar with preparing a test project, take a look at Creating a test project.

What happens when you disable Liquid Glass? Do you get the results that you want?

When you create a standard UIView (or SwiftUI View) that contains your custom buttons and layout and add custom view to the UITabBarController's view and anchor it to the bottom of the screen. When a user taps a button in your custom view, manually update the selected tab is when you get that result?

Are you testing on iOS 26.4? What Xcode version are you using?

Albert Pascual   Worldwide Developer Relations.

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