I'm building an app with a UISplitViewController as the base, with the main content being a UITabBarController. I'm targeting iOS 26+ and using UIKit. I've customised the tabbar on iOS to have a different font family and size, and used some custom images.
Running the same app on iPad, the tabbar moves to the top of the screen, ignores ALL the appearance proxy settings and strips out the images. Its now just giant floating text. Also noticed in portrait mode when the side bar from the split view is open, it compresses the width of the tab bar down to only show 2 elements at a time, with this weird custom scroll thing to move to the rest of the tabs. If the text wasn't so massive, maybe it could fit more.
I really hate every inch of this thing. Its looks ugly and functions bizarrely. Why does it ignore all the tabbar appearance settings, and how can I customise it to add icons back with smaller text?
Ideally I don't want to use one of the hacks to force it to think its compact mode to bring back the old tabbar, as i'm relying on traits already to fix some SplitView annoyances and don't want those to break. But would love to have the old tab bar style. Are there any settings or toggles that I can use?