How to add a badge to your UITabBarItem

Written by Paul Hudson    @twostraws

You can put a badge over any of your tab bar items, and doing so is a great way to encourage users to activate the tab to see what information you want to show them.

Even better, these badges can be anything you want - you can use a number if you like, but you can also use short words like “NEW” or even ASCII symbols like a star.

To try it out, add this code to any view controller that’s inside a tab bar controller:

tabBarItem.badgeValue = "NEW"

Available from iOS 2.0

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This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.