iOS 8 light status bar not working

Question

I've set the background color of the main UIView in my view controller to a bluish color.

I've also tried all combinations of the following:

• Adding this to the app delegate:

  UIApplication.sharedApplication().setStatusBarStyle(UIStatusBarStyle.LightContent, animated: true)

• Setting View controller status based application to NO and YES

• Setting 'Status Bar Style' to Light in the project overview.

I'm seeing black status bar text when I want to see white text.

I'd like to set the style at the application level, not the VC level.

My info.plist:

Answer 1

Status bar style is determined (by default) at the level of the view controller, not the application. Implement preferredStatusBarStyle in your view controller.

class ViewController : UIViewController {
    override func preferredStatusBarStyle() -> UIStatusBarStyle {
        return .LightContent
    }
}

You can determine status bar style at the application level, but to do so, you must throw a switch in your Info.plist. See the docs:

To opt out of the view controller-based status bar appearance behavior, you must add the UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance key with a value of NO to your app’s Info.plist file, but doing so is not recommended [my italics, and I don't even know whether this is even supported any longer].