Navigation bar becomes white when a UISearchController is added to it

Question

When I add a UISearchController to a UINavigationItem from an UINavigationController; it becomes white when the view loads and changes to the color specified when the user clicks on the search bar. This happened since ios 13.1. This video shows the behaviour:

https://imgur.com/wn5zbnJ

My code consists of a simple storyboard with a NavigationController + a TableViewController, and the NavigationController has a color assigned to it:

The ViewController consists of the following code:

class ViewController: UITableViewController {

    let searchController = UISearchController(searchResultsController: nil)

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        searchController.hidesNavigationBarDuringPresentation = false
        searchController.obscuresBackgroundDuringPresentation = false
        navigationItem.searchController = searchController
    }
}

I also added these keys to the info.plist file to force the app into light-mode, but if I remove these the same behaviour is still present:

<key>UIUserInterfaceStyle</key>
<string>Light</string>

This was tested on an iPhone XS Max, running iOS 13.1 beta 1. Is this expected behaviour or a bug which needs to be fixed?

Answer 1

It looks like it is required to use the new UINavigationBarAppearance on iOS 13. Try to add this to your viewDidLoad:

let appearance = UINavigationBarAppearance()
appearance.backgroundColor = .systemRed
appearance.titleTextAttributes = [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor : UIColor.white]
navigationItem.standardAppearance = appearance
navigationItem.scrollEdgeAppearance = appearance

You will probably also want to set the searchField backgroundColor:

let searchField = searchController.searchBar.searchTextField
searchField.backgroundColor = .systemBackground

Answer 2

This appears to be a bug in iOS 13.1. Specifically, there is a new iOS 13 specific appearance (UINavigationBarAppearance) for navigation bars which specifies the appearance when the scroll view is scrolled to the top, along with the default state. Normally changes like this only go into effect when the app is built with the corresponding SDK (iOS 13.1). However, there seems to be a bug where the behavior also occurs when an app is built using the iOS 12 SDK.

See: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uinavigationbarappearance

Update: There is a workaround here: https://itnext.io/fixing-issues-caused-by-future-sdks-ae0896384abf

Essentially, if your app is running on a device running iOS 13, it's possible to create instances of the new classes via NSClassFromString() in swift, then use a bit of objective-c runtime magic to configure the navigation bar.