What design paradigm would you use instead of placing 3 icons in the navbar on iOS?

Question

I have an iOS app and I need to add 3 icons to the navbar, however, when the user scrolls the screen, the 3 icons take up so much room in the navbar that the page title (which would move to the top center of the navbar) gets truncated to only a few letters on an SE (320px width).

Also the Apple HIG suggests only having a maximum of 2 icons.

I also feel that 3 icons is too much for the navbar on iPhone and I have never seen it done before.

Does anyone have a solution or example of a screen they have designed or have seen that deals with this dilemma?

I had thought about the ol' Ellipsis but Settings and Action Sheet shouldn't be inside an Ellipsis. Thanks

Answer 1

I used an "Actions" menu (instead of an ambiguous hamburger icon) that has all the space I need. Apple has an example of this in the second image on their guidelines page on pull-down menus.

You could even pop open an action sheet overlay from that if you liked that better.

As a non-designer/developer I've found browsing through the Apple guidelines or the material design guidelines can help me find the right control or paradigm for most situations.

Answer 2

Thanks Nate. I ended up just putting three icons in a row since it was a edge case on our app anyway. But I do agree the only other way to deal with this really is to add an action button and have all the items listed inside that. I didn’t want to have to put settings inside an action button but I could leave settings outside the action button. If I put items inside the action button then it becomes inconsistent with the rest of the app which is why I would hesitate to do that right now and I don’t like hiding things that get used often however because I’m designing for 320 pixels with for the iPhone SE as an extreme size then I might have to use your suggestion and have an action icon there. Thanks for the answer. Sorry my text got cut off before :)