The documented way to prevent the UIPageViewController from scrolling is to not assign the dataSource property. If you assign the data source it will move into ‘gesture-based’ navigation mode which is what you’re trying to prevent.
Without a data source you manually provide view controllers when you want to with setViewControllers:direction:animated:completion method and it will move between view controllers on demand.
The above can be deduced from Apple’s documentation of UIPageViewController (Overview, second paragraph):
To support gesture-based navigation, you must provide your view controllers using a data source object.