u/oneness33

I just spent an entire night tearing my hair out over this. I hit a really strange focus bug on iOS 26 and want to share it, both as a warning and in case someone knows what's actually going on under the hood.

Setup: a bottom "add item" bar living in .safeAreaBar(edge: .bottom), inside a NavigationStack that sits in a TabView. The bar shows a suggestions row above the text field, but only while the field has focus:

struct AddItemBar: View {
     var text: String
     private var isFocused: Bool

    var body: some View {
        VStack {
            if isFocused {
                SuggestionsView(...)   // horizontal ScrollView, .glassEffect()
            }

            HStack(spacing: 0) {
                TextField("1 kg tomatoes", text: $text)
                    .focused($isFocused)
                    .padding(.vertical, 12)
                    .padding(.horizontal)
                    .glassEffect()

                Button("Add", systemImage: "plus") { ... }
                    .buttonStyle(.glassProminent)
                    .buttonBorderShape(.circle)
            }
        }
        .animation(.default, value: isFocused)
    }
}

The bug: tap the field → keyboard comes up, typing works fine, but isFocused never becomes true. I put a debug Text(isFocused ? "FOCUS" : "NO FOCUS") in the bar: it says NO FOCUS the whole time the keyboard is up. So anything gated on the focus state (my suggestions row) simply never appears. No warnings, no console output, nothing.

What did NOT fix it:

• GlassEffectContainer + glassEffectID on every glass element (this is supposed to be the blessed way to handle dynamic glass shape sets). Bonus weirdness: with the container active, the text you type became invisible inside the field.
• Moving the glass off the field onto a background shape: .background { Capsule().glassEffect() }. Binding still never fires.
• Making the conditionally-inserted suggestions view non-glass (material background instead). Irrelevant, because the binding never fires in the first place; the conditional view isn't even inserted yet.

What DOES fix it (all verified on device):

• Putting any glass button before the TextField in the HStack. Moving my Add button to the left of the field: focus binding works instantly.
• Applying .glassEffect() to the whole HStack instead of the field itself (single capsule, compose-bar style): works.
• Funny enough, I only discovered the bug because I removed a glass Menu that used to sit left of the field. It had been masking the bug the entire time.

So the failing configuration is specifically: TextField as the first/leftmost glass element in a .safeAreaBar (under TabView), followed by a glass button. Reorder the elements and \@FocusState`` works; keep the field first and the binding is just dead, even though the keyboard and typing work normally.

I ended up shipping the "button on the left" layout. Has anyone else run into this? I'd love to understand the actual mechanism. My best guess is something about how Liquid Glass captures/hosts the field's content, but the container + glassEffectID route failing makes me think it's just a plain UIKit-bridging bug. Filing a Feedback either way.

Xcode 26.3, iOS 26.5, device