How to Hide Toolbar on Scroll in iOS

By default, a toolbar in UINavigationController will always be visible at the bottom of the screen.

Since iOS 8, UINavigationController expose a property, hidesBarsOnSwipe, that can hide a toolbar when users scrolling.

Why do we need to Hide a toolbar on scrolling

You probably need to hide a toolbar if you want to utilize screen resources as much as possible.

This might suit an app that main focus is to consume content.

Here is how it looks in action.

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How to Hide Toolbar on Scroll in UIKit

To make a toolbar show and hide according to the scrolling, we set the hidesBarsOnSwipe property to true.

Setting this value to true will enable these two behaviors.

• Hides the toolbar when users scroll down.
• When users try to go back up, the toolbar will reappear.

You set this value on a UINavigationController instance.

let nav = UINavigationController(rootViewController: MyViewController())
nav.hidesBarsOnSwipe = true

You can also set this value from within a view controller by reference to navigationController.

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    
    navigationController?.hidesBarsOnSwipe = true
}

Since it is a navigation controller's property, setting it to true will enable the behavior on any view controller under the navigation controller.

So, make sure you set it back to false if you want to enable this behavior on a specific view.

navigationController?.hidesBarsOnSwipe = false