Window Control Placement Notification in iPadOS 26

UI Frameworks UIKit
RolfS OP
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I’m seeing that in the windowed-apps multitasking mode, the new window controls (the three “traffic-light” icons) can overlap the top-left corner of my app’s main view.

Detection: How can I programmatically determine whether these window controls will be displayed? Geometry: If they are displayed, how can I find out their exact position and size? I’d like to adjust my layout at runtime to ensure no content is hidden beneath those controls. For reference, my main view does not include a status bar or navigation bar at the top.

Answered by RolfS in 844944022

Good news! On iPad—in both landscape and portrait—there’s room for a status bar in my app. With it enabled, everything works perfectly on both the main screen and the settings screen: the window control is inserted into the status bar as shown in the video, and you don’t need to use the UILayoutGuide discussed there.

As expected, the settings screen is positioned below the status bar, so the left-bar button is no longer obscured by the window controls.

On iPhone in landscape, there isn’t room for a status bar, but you can handle this by implementing prefersStatusBarHidden. Since multitasking is only available on iPadOS 26, this is the simplest solution on iPhone.

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Frameworks Engineer OP
Apple

We cover this topic in our "Make your UIKit app more flexible" around here:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/282/?time=785
RolfS OP

That doesn’t solve my issue:

The video only handles cases where a navigation bar is already at the top of the main screen. Please advise what can be done if this is not the case (as for my main screen).

On my settings screen (a table view with a navigation bar on top), I implemented your sample code, but the left-bar button on the navigation controller’s bar still doesn’t move and remains covered by the window controls. I must be doing something wrong.

Based on another user’s suggestion and also your video, I tried using UISceneWindowingControlStyleMinimal in my SceneDelegate.
Still about a third of the left-bar button is obscured by the window controls.

Here’s my Objective-C code (based on your Swift code) in the navigation bar subclass:

UIView *containerView = self.view; UIView *contentView = self.navigationBar;

UILayoutGuide *contentGuide; UIViewLayoutRegion *marginsRegion = [UIViewLayoutRegion marginsLayoutRegionWithCornerAdaptation: UIViewLayoutRegionAdaptivityAxisHorizontal];

contentGuide = [containerView layoutGuideForLayoutRegion:marginsRegion];

// Pin all four edges of the content view to that guide [NSLayoutConstraint activateConstraints:@[ [contentView.topAnchor constraintEqualToAnchor:contentGuide.topAnchor], [contentView.leadingAnchor constraintEqualToAnchor:contentGuide.leadingAnchor], [contentView.bottomAnchor constraintEqualToAnchor:contentGuide.bottomAnchor], [contentView.trailingAnchor constraintEqualToAnchor:contentGuide.trailingAnchor], ]];
RolfS OP
Accepted Answer

Good news! On iPad—in both landscape and portrait—there’s room for a status bar in my app. With it enabled, everything works perfectly on both the main screen and the settings screen: the window control is inserted into the status bar as shown in the video, and you don’t need to use the UILayoutGuide discussed there.

As expected, the settings screen is positioned below the status bar, so the left-bar button is no longer obscured by the window controls.

On iPhone in landscape, there isn’t room for a status bar, but you can handle this by implementing prefersStatusBarHidden. Since multitasking is only available on iPadOS 26, this is the simplest solution on iPhone.