iOS 26 TabBar Remove Selected Capsule

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.

Hey Albert, Thanks for the prompt response. Here is the link to Github repo: https://github.com/VJM158/UIKitTabBar

What happens when you disable Liquid Glass? Do you get the results that you want? - Yes, we get the desired result.

I using Xcode 26.3 with iOS 26.2 simulator

Using a fully custom view with buttons is definitely an option, but my concern is that I would lose a lot of built-in UITabBar behavior such as tapping the active tab to return to root, hidesBottomBarWhenPushed, accessibility support, badging, and other system-integrated behaviors.

This is a fairly large and complex app, so I’m hesitant to replace UITabBar entirely unless that is really the only reliable path. Please let me know if my understanding is correct. I’m mainly trying to understand what the recommended path forward is here.

Also, if Liquid Glass is enabled for the app, is the selected capsule in UITabBar mandatory?

Thanks for the post a the details including the screenshots showing exactly what you are seeing. Yes, there are many changes after Liquid Glass.

Your understanding is 100% correct. Rebuilding a UITabBar entirely from scratch is a massive undertaking for a complex app. Because of this maintenance burden and the risk of breaking standard navigation paradigms, replacing the standard UITabBar with a custom view is generally not the recommended path forward.

When the Liquid Glass appearance is enabled, the selected capsule is the system-standard visual indicator for the active tab. The framework enforces this specific visual treatment to maintain a consistent design language and accessibility standard across all the different systems.

Because Liquid Glass relies on a specific compositing and rendering pipeline to achieve that look, standard legacy overrides are often ignored or overridden by the system to ensure the capsule remains visible.

Since you mentioned that disabling Liquid Glass gives you the exact result you want, the recommended approach is to opt out of the Liquid Glass appearance for this specific UITabBar rather than trying to fight the framework or build a custom tab bar from scratch. Please remember that eventually that override will stop working.

If you want keep Liquid Glass enabled, and my personal opinion you should, for the rest of the app but want to alter the tab bar, you can try strictly enforcing a standard UITabBarAppearance to see if it overrides the Liquid Glass compositing for the tab bar specifically:

// sudo code, do not copy and paste 
let appearance = UITabBarAppearance()
appearance.configureWithOpaqueBackground() 

appearance.selectionIndicatorTintColor = .clear
appearance.selectionIndicatorImage = UIImage()

tabBar.standardAppearance = appearance

I know you do not like the appearance and behavior of Liquid Glass on UITabBar. I would recommend you to try to embrace it or customize it to something you can be happy with.

I understand that this may not be the response you were seeking.

Albert
  Worldwide Developer Relations.