Salesforce: Object tab visibility in App

A tab of an object is very useful and increases user daily productivity with fewer clicks, the tab will be visible in an app based on multiple settings, let's dive into it.

First, for a user to able to see the tab, the user must have access to the object via Profile or Permission Set. 

Default tab -- this mean, the tab will be always visible to the user, and users can't remove it from the Lightning app, the user will not see the cross icon when clicking the pencil icon from the navigation bar.

Users will not able to remove the Home tabs until the Chatter tabs

The criteria to make a tab become a default tab:

1. The user must have permission to access the object via Profile or Permission Set, and
2. The tab is added to the Navigation Items for the app in the Lightning App Builder, and
3. The tab is set to Default On in the Profile, or "Visible" is checked from Permission Set

If (2) or (3) is changed, the tab will be removed if a user has not customized the navigation items, but if the user has customized (rearrange) the navigation items, the tab will stay, but the user will be able to remove the tab by clicking the pencil icon from the navigation bar, see this blog for detail.

Not default tab -- the example from the above screenshot is "Glass", where the tab is removable. To make this happen, here are the requirements:

1. The user must have permission to access the object via Profile or Permission Set
2. The tab is set to Default Off in the Profile, or only "Available" is checked in the Permission Set, no matter whether it is added or not in the lightning app Navigation Items. 

The user should be able to search the tab from the 9-dots icon.

Reference:

• What happens when the admin adds or removes items from Navigation Items?

Salesforce: What happens when the admin adds or removes items from Navigation Items?

Lightning App Builder offers admin to add/remove items easily in Navigation Items. The items added will be shown as default items in the navigation bar, which also means the user will not able to remove the items added to the Navigation Items, the cross icon simply will appear when clicking the pencil icon at far right on the navigation bar.

Let us create a new app with 4 items:

This is how it looks like

When you click the pencil icon at the far right of the navigation bar

Items manually added by the user will have the cross icon to remove them.

What happened when the admin remove the existing items?

Will the item removed stay or remove for existing users? The answer is both, it can be stayed or removed, but here is the guidance

The items will stay if there is personalization done by the user. What does personalization here mean?

• Add new tabs
• Re-order existing tabs

However, even the tab stays, the user will be able to remove those items now.

In this scenario, the user re-orders Contacts after the Accounts tab

The items will be removed if there is no personalization done by that particular user, even that user actively used the tabs in the past.

How do I know if a user has personalized the tab?

If the user clicks the pencil icon, notice on "Reset Navigation to Default", if this is clickable (blue color), this means the menu has been personalized. But if "Reset Navigation to Default" is not clickable (gray color), this means the user has not personalized their menu.

How about adding new tabs?

Adding new tabs will always be added to all users who use the Lightning app, no matter if they have or have not personalized their navigation menu.

Reference:

• Personalized Navigation Considerations, see 1st bullet point