[abulenok]

Summary

The SwiftUI pager's collection view claimed every horizontal drag, so react-native-screens' full-screen back swipe (its own pan recognizer before iOS 26, interactiveContentPopGestureRecognizer on iOS 26) never won, even on the first page. Recognizing simultaneously does not help because UIKit still hands the touch to the scroll view, so the pan has to be refused before it begins. UIKit only asks the scroll view itself in gestureRecognizerShouldBegin, so the introspected collection view gets a runtime subclass, the same approach disableSafeArea() uses.

The pan is refused only on page 0 of a horizontal pager, only in the back direction, and only while the nearest navigation controller can pop. iOS 26 also attaches UIScrollViewPagingSwipeGestureRecognizer to paging scroll views, which flips a page on a quick flick even when the pan never begins; it is refused under the same conditions.

Fixes #1050
The implementation is based on @nickbvr comment #1050 (comment)

Test Plan

What's required for testing (prerequisites)?

Example app from the repo

What are the steps to reproduce (after prerequisites)?

1. Navigate to Issue #1050 Back Gesture Repro screen

   LTR:

   • back swipe on page 0 goes back
   • back swipe on page 1 goes to page 0
   • forward swipe on page 0 goes to page 1

2. Navigate to Issue #1050 Nested Stack Back Gesture Repro

   LTR:

   • back swipe on page 0 goes back
   • forward swipe on page 0 goes to page 1

RTL: switch the direction with the toggle and repeat previous tests with mirrored swipes.

Compatibility

OS	Implemented
iOS	✅
Android	❌

Checklist

• I have tested this on a device and a simulator
• I added the documentation in README.md
• I updated the typed files (TS and Flow)

[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

Arbitration misses iOS 15’s embedded paging scroller and suppresses overdrag when no eligible back gesture is available.

2 open issues

• Preserve first-page overdrag when no eligible back gesture exists · New
• Apply pan arbitration to embedded iOS 15 paging scroll views · New

What changed in this PR

Updates the SwiftUI iOS pager to yield first-page back swipes to navigation, addressing #1050.

Changes:

• Tracks pager state for gesture arbitration.
• Adds runtime overrides for paging pans and iOS 26 paging-swipe recognizers.

File	Description
ios/​PagerView.swift	Attaches the observer and synchronizes pager state.
ios/​PagerGestureObserver.swift	Implements direction-aware back-gesture arbitration.

_{Review effort: Balanced}

[Doberjohn]

This needs a rebase onto main. #1187 added SwiftPM support, and ios/Package.swift lists its Swift sources by name, so after the merge PagerGestureObserver.swift isn't compiled under SPM and PagerView.swift fails with "cannot find PagerGestureObserver in scope". Two changes fix it:

1. Add "PagerGestureObserver.swift" to the RNCPagerViewSwift sources list.
2. Add the import the other Swift files use, since PagerLayoutDirection now comes from the ObjC module under SPM:

#if SWIFT_PACKAGE
import react_native_pager_view
#endif

The merge is clean and ios-spm isn't a required check, so nothing would catch this before it lands.

[Doberjohn]

Could you add an e2e test and fill in the Test Plan? The fix depends on private class names (UIScrollViewPagingSwipeGestureRecognizer, the RNS recognizers), on when introspect calls customize, and on gesture ordering, so a later change could quietly turn it into a no-op. The example already pushes every screen on a native stack, so an e2e/tests/issues/issue-1050-*.e2e.ts should be small:

• page 0: a mid-screen back swipe pops the screen
• page 1: the same swipe goes to page 0 and does not pop
• an RTL variant
• a forward swipe on page 0 still reaches page 1

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[abulenok]

@Doberjohn Thanks for the review! I addressed the comments