Adapt UI to handle floating tab bar on iPad

[herzbube]

With iOS 18 Apple made changes how the tab bar of UITabBarController works on iPad. After upgrading the app to the iOS 26 base SDK, the following behaviour can be observed: UIKit sometimes shows the tab bar at the bottom of the screen (as usual), and sometimes at the top of the screen (new). In the Portrait layout, when UIKit displays the tab bar at the top of the screen, there is a weird interaction with the navigation bar that Little Go uses for buttons and status text:

• A new, separate bar appears above the navigation bar.
• The tab bar appears integrated into that new, separate bar.
• Bar buttons appear integrated into that new, separate bar, although Little Go would like to add them to the navigation bar.
• Even worse, instead of keeping left and right bar buttons separate, they are lumped together into one group.
• And because there is not enough space for displaying the bar buttons (the tab bar takes up too much space), UIKit creates a sub-menu where most of the bar buttons are "hidden" as menu items.
• The only thing still shown in the navigation bar is the status view.

[herzbube]

This StackOverflow answer shows that the original tab bar behaviour can be restored by registering the key "UseFloatingTabBar" with value "NO" with the standard NSUserDefaults object.

This is an undocumented workaround. Apparently it still works on iOS 26, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to work in the future.

[herzbube]

Elevating your iPad app with a tab bar and sidebar: An Apple document that describes the new tab bar behaviour like this:

In iPadOS, the tab bar floats over your content at the top, giving you more space for your app’s content. Additionally, because the tab bar shares space with the navigation bar, it places your tabs closer to your app’s other controls.