Disable TabLayout

I had the same problem and I solved it disabling touch event on tabs with the following code:

  LinearLayout tabStrip = ((LinearLayout)mTabLayout.getChildAt(0));
    for(int i = 0; i < tabStrip.getChildCount(); i++) {
        tabStrip.getChildAt(i).setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
            @Override
            public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
                return true;
            }
        });
    }

I found a similar answer that is a little more simple and also allows you to re-enable the tabs later if you wanted to without having to deal with overriding the onTouch event.

TabLayout tabLayout = (TabLayout)  mParentView.findViewById(R.id.my_tabs);

LinearLayout tabStrip = ((LinearLayout)tabLayout.getChildAt(0));
tabStrip.setEnabled(false);
for(int i = 0; i < tabStrip.getChildCount(); i++) {
    tabStrip.getChildAt(i).setClickable(false);
}

And if you want to re-enable the tabs just set tabStrip.setEnabled and setClickable for the child elements to true

LinearLayout tabStrip = ((LinearLayout)tabLayout.getChildAt(0));
tabStrip.setEnabled(true);
for(int i = 0; i < tabStrip.getChildCount(); i++) {
    tabStrip.getChildAt(i).setClickable(true);
}