Disable gesture to pull down form/page sheet modal presentation

Use this in the presented ViewController viewDidLoad:

if #available(iOS 13.0, *) {
    self.isModalInPresentation = true
}

In my case, I have a modal screen with a view that receives touches to capture customer signatures.

Disabling the gesture recognizer in the navigation controller solved the problem, preventing the modal interactive dismissal from being triggered at all.

The following methods are implemented in our modal view controller, and are called via delegate from our custom signature view.

Called from touchesBegan:

private func disableDismissalRecognizers() {
    navigationController?.presentationController?.presentedView?.gestureRecognizers?.forEach {
        $0.isEnabled = false
    }
}

Called from touchesEnded:

private func enableDismissalRecognizers() {
    navigationController?.presentationController?.presentedView?.gestureRecognizers?.forEach {
        $0.isEnabled = true
    }
}

Here is a GIF showing the behavior:

This question, flagged as duplicate, describes better the issue I had: Disabling interactive dismissal of presented view controller on iOS 13 when dragging from the main view

In general, you shouldn't try to disable the swipe to dismiss functionality, as users expect all form/page sheets to behave the same across all apps. Instead, you may want to consider using a full-screen presentation style. If you do want to use a sheet that can't be dismissed via swipe, set isModalInPresentation = true, but note this still allows the sheet to be pulled down vertically and it'll bounce back up upon releasing the touch. Check out the UIAdaptivePresentationControllerDelegate documentation to react when the user tries to dismiss it via swipe, among other actions.

If you have a scenario where your app's gesture or touch handling is impacted by the swipe to dismiss feature, I did receive some advice from an Apple engineer on how to fix that.

If you can prevent the system's pan gesture recognizer from beginning, this will prevent the gestural dismissal. A few ways to do this:

1. If your canvas drawing is done with a gesture recognizer, such as your own UIGestureRecognizer subclass, enter the began phase before the sheet’s dismiss gesture does. If you recognize as quickly as UIPanGestureRecognizer, you will win, and the sheet’s dismiss gesture will be subverted.

2. If your canvas drawing is done with a gesture recognizer, setup a dynamic failure requirement with -shouldBeRequiredToFailByGestureRecognizer: (or the related delegate method), where you return NO if the passed in gesture recognizer is a UIPanGestureRecognizer.

3. If your canvas drawing is done with manual touch handling (e.g. touchesBegan:), override -gestureRecognizerShouldBegin on your touch handling view, and return NO if the passed in gesture recognizer is a UIPanGestureRecognizer.

With my setup #3 proved to work very well. This allows the user to swipe down anywhere outside of the drawing canvas to dismiss (like the nav bar), while allowing the user to draw without moving the sheet, just as one would expect.

I cannot recommend trying to find the gesture to disable it, as it seems to be rather dynamic and can reenable itself when switching between different size classes for example, and this could change in future releases.

This gesture can be found in the modal view controller's presentedView property. As I debugged, the gestureRecognizers array of this property has only one item and printing it resulted in something like this:

UIPanGestureRecognizer: 0x7fd3b8401aa0 (_UISheetInteractionBackgroundDismissRecognizer);

So to disable this gesture you can do like below:

let vc = UIViewController()

self.present(vc, animated: true, completion: {
  vc.presentationController?.presentedView?.gestureRecognizers?[0].isEnabled = false
})

To re-enable it simply set isEnabled back to true:

vc.presentationController?.presentedView?.gestureRecognizers?[0].isEnabled = true

Note that iOS 13 is still in beta so a simpler approach might be added in an upcoming release.

Although this solution seems to work at the moment, I would not recommend it as it might not work in some situations or might be changed in future iOS releases and possibly affect your app.