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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T16:33:55+00:00

My app has a view controller hierarchy set up like this: UITabBarController | UINavigationController

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My app has a view controller hierarchy set up like this:

UITabBarController
    |
    UINavigationController
    |  |
    |  UIViewController
    |
    UINavigationController
       |
       UIViewController

All of my view controllers that are within this hierarchy override the method:

- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation

and return YES – therefore the view controller should be able to rotate to any rotation – even upside down.

However, within this setup none of the view controllers successfully rotate. I was under the impression that navigation and tab bar controllers would rotate if their view controllers respond to rotating.

Why won’t my view controllers rotate?

The only way I’ve been able to get them to rotate is by subclassing UINavigationController and overriding it’s shouldAutorotate method, but this feels unnecessary to me and I was wondering if there’s something I’ve missed to make this work.

Edit:

According to the User Experience Coding How-to:

If you are also using a toolbar, the view controller for each toolbar item must implement the shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method and return YES for each of the orientations you wish to support. If you have a navigation controller for a toolbar item, the root view controller of that navigation controller must implement the shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method and return YES.

It says ‘toolbar’ – but I think this is a typo and is probably supposed to be ‘tab bar’.

So it seems that I’m implementing this correctly, yet my controllers still do not auto rotate.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve run into this problem, but I can’t remember the exact reason it occurred. The tab bar controller requires all of its view controllers to respond YES when asked about a particular orientation for it to rotate to that orientation.

    If presented modally, it seems like it doesn’t matter about the underlying VC system.

    I have created a test to show this (RotationTest on GitHub), but it all seems to be working. Hopefully I can remember why I was failing with this one at some point.

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