How to disable liquid glass design when building for iOS 26 [duplicate]

Question

I’m working on an iOS app using Xcode 26 (iOS 26 SDK), and after rebuilding the project, the UITabBarController now uses the new Liquid Glass appearance introduced in iOS 26.

However, our app is cross-platform (iOS and Android), and our design team has standardized the tab bar UI to match the classic iOS style — that is, how UITabBarController looked in iOS 18 and earlier. They’re unlikely to redesign the UI specifically for iOS 26.

At the moment, I haven’t found any API to opt out of the new tab bar appearance or revert to the old style.

To make matters worse, hidesBottomBarWhenPushed seems to no longer work properly under the new Liquid Glass tab bar style.

So my questions are:

• Is there a way to restore the previous tab bar appearance (pre-iOS 18) while still targeting iOS 26?
• If not, is there any recommended workaround or customization approach that can help replicate the old style manually?
• Has anyone else encountered this issue when updating to Xcode 26?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Add UIDesignRequiresCompatibility to your Info.plist and set it to YES, your app will run using the old OS design instead of the new Liquid Glass design.

Apple allows developers to temporarily opt out of Liquid Glass in Xcode 26, but this option will be removed in Xcode 27, making Liquid Glass mandatory.