How to hide the tab bar when a view controller is shown

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

If you’re using UITabBarController to display a tab strip at the bottom of your user interface, the default behavior for iOS is to display the tabs at all times – even if the user has navigated deep into a UINavigationController in one of the tabs.

If you don’t want that behavior, you should set hidesBottomBarWhenPushed to true where applicable. This will hide the tab bar along with any toolbars you had showing, but only when a view controller is pushed onto the navigation stack. This allows you to show the tab bar at first, then hide it when you need more room.

If you’re using segues, the best place to set this property is inside the prepare(for:) method, where you configure any other properties in your destination view controller:

override func prepare(for segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: Any?) {
    self.hidesBottomBarWhenPushed = true
}

If you aren’t using segues, you will usually need to override the initializer for your view controller and set hidesBottomBarWhenPushed to true there, like this:

override init(nibName nibNameOrNil: String?, bundle nibBundleOrNil: Bundle?) {
    super.init(nibName: nibNameOrNil, bundle: nibBundleOrNil)
    hidesBottomBarWhenPushed = true
}