fix: honour per-screen tab-bar hiding on the custom-Column chrome path

[shanerbaner82]

Fixes #250.

The bug

public function tabBarOptions(): ?TabBarOptions
{
    return TabBarOptions::make()->hidden();
}

No effect. Same for the protected bool $hidesTabBar = true; shortcut.

Cause

There are two chrome paths (NativeComponent.php:539), and per-screen tab hiding was only wired into one of them:

• Native chrome → wrapWithNativeChrome() checks shouldHideTabBar() and folds hideTabBar onto the sentinel. Works.
• Custom Column → buildChromeColumn() appends $tabBar->toElement() unconditionally. shouldHideTabBar() had exactly one caller in the codebase — inside wrapWithNativeChrome() — so nothing on this path could ever remove the bar.

Which path you get is the crux: NativeLayout::usesNativeChrome() returns false by default. A layout that defines tabBar() without also overriding it lands on the broken path, which is the common case and matches the report.

The asymmetry that makes this clearly a bug rather than a design choice: NavBar already had the equivalent guard, 24 lines earlier —

// NativeComponent.php:502
if ($navBar !== null && ! $usesNativeChrome && $this->shouldHideNavBar()) {
    $navBar = null;
}

so $hidesNavBar / navigationOptions()->hidden() worked where the TabBar equivalents did not.

Fix

Mirror that guard in the TabBar branch. Nulling the bar (rather than passing a flag) is deliberate and matches the NavBar comment — "On the custom-Column path hiding is identical to the layout returning null" — and it's also what buildChromeColumn() needs: it picks its safe-area variant from which bars exist (lines 726–730), so a null tab bar correctly hands the bottom edge back to the wrapper.

The native-chrome path is untouched: it keeps the bar config and folds hide_tab_bar onto the sentinel, because the TabView has to survive for tab switching.

Not the cause

The wire path was intact end to end, so despite the report being Android-only, neither renderer was at fault:

• NativeRootTabs.php:109 maps hideTabBar → hide_tab_bar
• NativeRootTabsRenderer.kt:169,305 reads it and skips the bottom bar
• NativeRootTabsRenderer.swift:463 does the same

TabBarOptions::hidden() / isHidden() were also correct.

Why it shipped

The only test covering this (TestingSuiteV2Test.php:223) used ChromeTabsLayout, whose usesNativeChrome() returns true — so it exercised only the working path, and only through the $hidesTabBar boolean, never the builder. The Column path had zero coverage for tab hiding.

Added:

• tab hiding on the Column path, both spellings, with a visible control
• tab hiding via the tabBarOptions() builder on the native path

The new Column-path test fails on main and passes with the fix. The new native-path builder test passes on main — it's pinning down behavior that already worked but was untested, and it's what confirms the builder itself was never broken.

assertTabBarHidden() / assertTabBarVisible() carried the same asymmetry as the source — they only understood the native sentinel and hard-failed with "No native tab chrome rendered" on the Column path. They now handle both, matching assertNavBarHidden().

Test run

Before: 901 tests / 3021 assertions / 0 failures. After: 903 / 3029 / 0 failures.

One caveat

The reporter didn't share their layout, so I can't be certain theirs doesn't override usesNativeChrome(). If it does, their symptom has a different cause and this is a separate bug found while investigating. The default-false behavior makes this by far the likelier explanation, and the missing guard is a real bug regardless.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[mustafa-online]

Will this be merged soon?