fix: TabController - clear stuck press feedback when a tap is cancelled on iOS

[mika-bejerano]

Description

On iOS a tab keeps its activeBackgroundColor painted on it indefinitely after a
cancelled tap — including after another tab is selected. It is intermittent, and it
accumulates: every cancelled tap leaves another tab tinted, because each item owns its
own isPressed.

Root cause. TabBarItem latched its press feedback in isPressed from
onTouchesDown and cleared it only in onFinalize — a single point of failure.

On iOS a cancelled tap (e.g. when the enclosing horizontal FadedScrollView claims the
touch after a few pixels of finger drift) transitions the recognizer straight from
POSSIBLE to CANCELLED. UIKit emits no action message for that transition, and
RNGestureHandler's RNTapHandler only compensates for it manually on FAILED (twice —
in interactionsMoved and again in reset), never on CANCELLED. So no state change
event reaches JS and onFinalize never runs.

This gesture also sets no maxDistance, so finger drift cannot produce FAILED (which
would emit an event) — the silent cancel is the only terminal path.

Android is unaffected: GestureHandler.cancel() goes through moveToState, which
dispatches the state change, so onFinalize runs.

The fix. The cancel path does still reach JS — as a touch event; only the state
change is lost. So the clear is hooked onto the channel that works:

.onTouchesCancelled(() => {
  isPressed.value = false;
});

Every terminal path is now covered: iOS ENDED/FAILED via onFinalize, iOS
CANCELLED via onTouchesCancelled, Android via both. The extra call on Android is
idempotent (both write false), and cancelPointers() has exactly one call site,
guarded to terminal transitions — so the feedback can never be released mid-press.

Verification. Reproduced in the TabController demo screen on an iOS 26.4 simulator
with the pre-fix code (three tabs left tinted at once), then confirmed the tint no
longer sticks with the fix, after a full app restart — not Fast Refresh, which remounts
and would clear isPressed regardless. tsc clean; ESLint output byte-identical to the
pre-fix file (3 pre-existing react-hooks/exhaustive-deps warnings, 0 errors); 951
tests / 60 suites / 65 snapshots passing.

No automated test guards this path: reproducing it requires simulating a missing
state-change event from iOS native code, which a jest mock of
react-native-gesture-handler cannot do — such a test would assert the mock, not the
bug.

Changelog

TabController.TabBar — fixed an iOS-only bug where a tab stayed highlighted with
activeBackgroundColor after a tap was cancelled (for example by the tab bar scrolling
under your finger). The highlight is press feedback and is meant to be momentary, but it
stayed painted on the item indefinitely, including after a different tab was selected,
and accumulated across taps. Affects any TabController.TabBar that sets
activeBackgroundColor (or activeOpacity) and is horizontally scrollable.

Additional info

The underlying gap is upstream in react-native-gesture-handler (2.24.0):
apple/Handlers/RNTapHandler.m sets self.state = UIGestureRecognizerStateCancelled
from POSSIBLE without a manual [self triggerAction], and its reset only re-triggers
if (self.state == UIGestureRecognizerStateFailed) — so the cancelled transition emits
nothing. This affects anyone using Gesture.Tap() with onTouchesDown inside a
ScrollView, not just this component. Worth filing against
software-mansion/react-native-gesture-handler; the fix here is correct independently.

No Jira ticket — reported from apps using the shared top navigation bar.

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