How can I make iOS use the right navigation transition?

Question

I've got an app with a totally standard UINavigationController using the default transition that slides the new view controller in from right to left. When I hit the Back button, it slides the previous view controller in from left to right. This works fine on iPhone and iPad, in both orientations, in iOS 5.1 and iOS 6. It also works in portrait mode on iOS 5.0.

BUT, in landscape mode on iOS 5.0 it does not work. New view controllers correctly slide in from right to left, but when I hit Back, the old previous view controller slides in from top to bottom.

This is very disorienting and I can't imagine where the behavior is coming from. I'm doing a plain vanilla push and pop of the view controllers, and it works fine in all the other combinations of OS and device and orientation. So what's going on here, and how can I fix it?

This will sound snarky but I'm being serious - drop support for iOS 5.0. Any device that can run 5.0 can run 5.1. 5.1 fixed a lot of bugs in 5.0 and added a few useful APIs as well. — rmaddy
We may well do this. Except that if we do, people who have 5.0 won't think "oh, of course my creaky old OS isn't supported", they'll think, "this app is buggy". So I don't want to do this if I don't have to. — Joshua Frank

Joshua Frank Joshua Frank · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-21T16:23:47

Well, I think this is simply a bug in iOS 5, since fixed in 6. To work around it, I figured out how to apply the correct transition manually; I override PopViewControllerAnimated in a custom UINavigationController subclass, and do this:

//make a custom transition that does (very close to 
var transition = CATransition.CreateAnimation ();
transition.Duration = 0.25f;
transition.Type = CATransition.TransitionPush;
transition.Subtype = CATransition.TransitionFromLeft;

this.View.Layer.AddAnimation (transition, "slide");

var ret = base.PopViewControllerAnimated (false);

this.View.Layer.RemoveAnimation ( "slide");

return ret;

Note that I'm using C# and Xamarin.iOS, but that's unrelated to the underlying problem.

How can I make iOS use the right navigation transition?

2 Answers