How to change the status bar style when a view controller is loading?

Question

I am able to hide the status bar on the launch screen by setting Status bar is initially hidden to YES in Info.plist and then I want to show it on my first view controller with a .lightContent style.

However UIApplication.shared.statusBarStyle = .lightContent is deprecated since iOS 9 (so I don't want to use it) and using the following code give me a black status bar on my first view controller.

override var preferredStatusBarStyle: UIStatusBarStyle {
    return .lightContent
}

How can I change the status bar style when my first view controller load?

I am trying to find a global solution like UIApplication.shared.statusBarStyle = .lightContent since I don't really want to set the status bar style for every view controller. I have tested the solutions with View controller-based status bar appearance set to YES and NO .

Answer 1

The problem you're experiencing is that UINavigationController doesn't defer the choice of status bar to its view controllers.

Instead, for a navigation controller, the status bar style can be set by adjusting the barStyle property of its navigationBar .

If it is set to a black style, then the status bar will be light style:

navigationController?.navigationBar.barStyle = .black

Note, that this will also change the color of the navigationBar , however you can still set the bar's colour to whatever you want using barTintColor :

navigationController?.navigationBar.barTintColor = .purple

If you want to make a global change, so that all instances of UINavigationController use the same status bar style (useful if you've got multiple tabs all of which use a navigation controller), then you can add an extension on UINavigationController and override the preferredStatusBarStyle property:

extension UINavigationController {
    open override var preferredStatusBarStyle: UIStatusBarStyle {
        return .lightContent
    }
}

A final option, is to defer the choice to the view controllers in the navigation controller's stack.

To do that, override the childViewControllerForStatusBarStyle property of your navigation controller extension and have it return the topViewController :

extension UINavigationController {
    open override var childViewControllerForStatusBarStyle: UIViewController? {
        return topViewController
    }
}

In this case, you'll need to override preferredStatusBarStyle in all of your view controllers (not the optimal approach, but it's an option if you need this granular level of control on a per-child-controller basis).

All of these solutions require that your View controller-based status bar appearance key in Info.plist is set to YES .