UINavigationBar Appearance on Modal Not Setting

Question

I am using the following code in my appDelegate to set the appearance of my UINavigationBar and status bar throughout my app:

[[UINavigationBar appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor whiteColor]];
[[UINavigationBar appearance] setTitleTextAttributes:@{NSForegroundColorAttributeName: [UIColor whiteColor]}];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarStyle:UIStatusBarStyleLightContent];

This code correctly sets the appearance of everything to white everywhere except when a third-party modal viewController is prevented, such as from the Dropbox API or the Mail/Message viewController from a UIActivityViewController. I've included some screenshots to show how these are looking.

UIActivityViewController Mail:

UIActivityViewController Message:

Dropbox API:

I tried putting this in

[[UINavigationBar appearanceWhenContainedIn:[MFMailComposeViewController class], nil] setTitleTextAttributes:@{NSForegroundColorAttributeName: [UIColor whiteColor]}];

as well as

[[UINavigationBar appearanceWhenContainedIn:[UIActivityViewController class], nil] setTintColor:[UIColor whiteColor]];

and neither one is working.

Answer 1

Like you, I've been trying to alter the appearance of UIActivityViewController and it's "sub" controllers. It seems that in iOS7 the appearance API is somewhat buggy. UIActivityViewController is probably a different process and for sure a separate window, so I'm not really surprised that it's troublesome to style it.

Anyway I found an interesting way around this issue, but your designers might not like it. Create a subclass of UIWindow (ex: MyWindow), instantiate it as your main window and every time you use appearance API use it like this:

[UINavigationBar appearanceWhenContainedIn:[MyWindow class], nil].barTintColor = [UIColor redColor];

This way you'll only style views that actually belong to your application and the Apple-provided views will remain white/blue. I guess it's not the solution you were looking for, but on the other hand it gives users a good understanding what is your app and what is system-provided ;)