iOS Home Screen redesign using modern API and design language
Blog post from Box
Box rebuilt its home-screen navigation around Apple’s UITab and UITabGroup APIs to replace separate iPhone tab-bar and iPad sidebar implementations with a single adaptive UITabBarController model. The new data-driven tab tree lets UIKit adapt navigation across device sizes, reduces duplicated legacy code, keeps destinations and deep-link behavior more consistent, and simplifies adding features such as Notes, Hubs, and Box AI. The team still implemented a custom compact-layout sub-tab bar because group children are not automatically presented that way on iPhones, and it faced limits on sidebar appearance customization and differing behavior between iPadOS versions. The Liquid Glass redesign introduced further challenges because it applied app-wide rather than per screen, requiring broad styling updates, compatibility handling for iOS 18 and iOS 26, temporary compiler checks while CI lagged behind Xcode 26, and updates to accessibility-based functional tests. AI tools supported code refactoring, identification of obsolete code and affected interfaces, implementation work, and adaptation of tests to the new navigation hierarchy.
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