How to change Status Bar text color in iOS

Question or problem with Swift language programming:

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?

How to solve the problem:

Solution 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 {
    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())

Solution 2:

Alternatively, you can opt out of the view-controller based status bar appearance:

1. Set View controller-based status bar appearance to NO in your Info.plist.
2. Call [[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarStyle:UIStatusBarStyleLightContent];

Note: This method has been deprecated in iOS9. Use preferredStatusBarStyle on the UIViewController instead. (see Apple Developer Library)

Solution 3:

You can do this without writing any line of code!

Do the following to make the status bar text color white through the whole app

On you project plist file:

• Status bar style: Transparent black style (alpha of 0.5)
• View controller-based status bar appearance: NO
• Status bar is initially hidden: NO

Solution 4:

Note: Most upvoted answer does not work for iOS 7 / 8

In Info.plist set ‘View controller-based status bar appearance’ as NO

In AppDelegate add

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] setStatusBarStyle:UIStatusBarStyleLightContent];

to

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions{
   ......
   ...
}    

This solution works for iOS 7 / 8

Solution 5:

For me, nothing happened with using all the things in the other answers (and from other sources/documentation). What did help was to set the Navigation Bar Style to “Black” in the XIB. This changed the text to white without any code at all.

Hope this helps!