iOS - Set UITabBar Icons

Question

I've checked a couple of solutions, saw you can set it in the storyboard but to set the icon you have to set it as a default identifier, and doing so removes the title and sets the default one, if you set the title to your own title it reverts to custom and no icon image once again.

I'd like to use the default iOS icon images for this, instead of downloading some images off the web.

I also tried to set it up in the AppDelegate in didFinishLaunching by getting the TabBar by accessing the rootViewController, but it gives me an undefined selector error when setting the tab bar items. What does seem to work is setting the tabBarItem property in my view controllers, but this way only one is set when the view shows and I want them both to be set already, also same issue as with the identifier in storyboard, it sets the default title of the icon.

Answer 1

It's against the iOS HIG to use the system-provided tab bar icons with non-standard titles. It's not a good idea because the icon/title combinations are part of the common UI language that users come to expect.

So you won't find a way in the standard APIs to set system-provided tab bar icons without also setting the corresponding standard titles.