How to change the blue highlight color of a UITableViewCell?

Question

You can change the highlight color in several ways.

1. Change the selectionStyle property of your cell. If you change it to UITableViewCellSelectionStyleGray, it will be gray.

2. Change the selectedBackgroundView property. Actually what creates the blue gradient is a view. You can create a view and draw what ever you like, and use the view as the background of your table view cells.

Zonble has already provided an excellent answer. I thought it may be useful to include a short code snippet for adding a UIView to the tableview cell that will present as the selected background view.

cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];

    UIView *selectionColor = [[UIView alloc] init];
    selectionColor.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:(245/255.0) green:(245/255.0) blue:(245/255.0) alpha:1];
    cell.selectedBackgroundView = selectionColor;

• cell is my UITableViewCell
• I created a UIView and set its background color using RGB colours (light gray)
• I then set the cell selectedBackgroundView to be the UIView that I created with my chosen background colour

This worked well for me. Thanks for the tip Zonble.

UITableViewCell has three default selection styles:-

1. Blue
2. Gray
3. None

Implementation is as follows:-

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *) indexPath {

     [cell setSelectionStyle:UITableViewCellSelectionStyleNone];       
}

In Swift, use this in cellForRowAtIndexPath

let selectedView = UIView()
selectedView.backgroundColor = .white
cell.selectedBackgroundView = selectedView

If you want your selection color be the same in every UITableViewCell, use this in AppDelegate.

let selectedView = UIView()
selectedView.backgroundColor = .white
UITableViewCell.appearance().selectedBackgroundView = selectedView

If you want to change it app wide, you can add the logic to your App Delegate

class AppDelegate: UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate {

    //... truncated

   func application(application: UIApplication!, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: NSDictionary!) -> Bool {

        // set up your background color view
        let colorView = UIView()
        colorView.backgroundColor = UIColor.yellowColor()

        // use UITableViewCell.appearance() to configure 
        // the default appearance of all UITableViewCells in your app
        UITableViewCell.appearance().selectedBackgroundView = colorView

        return true
    }

    //... truncated
}