How to change Status Bar text color in iOS

Question

My application has a dark background, but in iOS 7 the status bar became transparent. So I can't see anything there, only the green battery indicator in the corner. How can I change the status bar text color to white like it is on the home screen?

Answer 1

1. Set the UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance to YES in the .plist file.

2. In the viewDidLoad do a [self setNeedsStatusBarAppearanceUpdate];

3. Add the following method:

   - (UIStatusBarStyle)preferredStatusBarStyle {      return UIStatusBarStyleLightContent;  } 

Note: This does not work for controllers inside UINavigationController, please see Tyson's comment below :)

Swift 3 - This will work controllers inside UINavigationController. Add this code inside your controller.

// Preferred status bar style lightContent to use on dark background. // Swift 3 override var preferredStatusBarStyle: UIStatusBarStyle {     return .lightContent } 

Swift 5 and SwiftUI

For SwiftUI create a new swift file called HostingController.swift

import Foundation import UIKit import SwiftUI  class HostingController: UIHostingController<ContentView> {     override var preferredStatusBarStyle: UIStatusBarStyle {         return .lightContent     } } 

Then change the following lines of code in the SceneDelegate.swift

window.rootViewController = UIHostingController(rootView: ContentView()) 

to

window.rootViewController = HostingController(rootView: ContentView())