iOS: Focusing headerSearchBarOptions hides entire navigation header (title, headerLeft, headerRight)

[tyler6204]

Description

When using headerSearchBarOptions on iOS, focusing the search text field causes the entire navigation header to disappear, including:

• headerTitle
• headerLeft
• headerRight

This happens consistently on iOS 26.0–26.2 (tested), and the header reappears only after the search field loses focus.

Expected behavior:
When the search bar is focused, the navigation header should remain visible or behave like the native iOS search-in-header experience, preserving title and header actions.

Actual behavior:
As soon as the search bar receives focus, the header becomes hidden/blank. No title or header buttons are rendered during focus.

This appears to be an iOS-only issue related to native header handling.

Screenshots showing before/after focus are attached.

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a screen using @react-navigation/native-stack
2. Configure headerSearchBarOptions on the screen
3. Render a header with headerTitle, headerLeft, and/or headerRight
4. Run the app on iOS
5. Tap the search bar to focus it
6. Observe that the entire header disappears while the search bar is focused

Snack or a link to a repository

Images Attached

Screens version

4.16.0

React Native version

0.81.5

Platforms

iOS

JavaScript runtime

Hermes

Workflow

Expo managed workflow

Architecture

Fabric (New Architecture)

Build type

Debug mode

Device

Real device

Device model

iPhone 16 Pro (iOS 26.2)

Acknowledgements

Yes

[github-actions]

Hey! 👋

The issue doesn't seem to contain a minimal reproduction.

Could you provide a snack or a link to a GitHub repository under your username that reproduces the problem?

[kkafar]

Hey!
Thanks for the report. We need to verify whether this is "our" issue or native one.

I'm adding this one to backlog.

[julian-gargicevich]

@kkafar
Yep, this is quite annoying and makes it hard to achieve a native search experience. Apple photos for example has search plus visible header.

Pre-iOS 26 you could sometimes work around this by using absolutely positioned footer actions, but with Liquid Glass there’s now no way to calculate the search input height. Without access to the search bar height, layout and content offsets become guesswork, which makes the problem even worse.