Status bar style light content if deployment target is below iOS 7?

Question

In the app I am working on I unfortunately have to use iOS 6 as my deployment target (iOS 7 being my base SDK). Is there any way I can have the UIStatusBar style Light Content? Even though it would only work for the iOS 7 users.

Answer 1

This is the enum for UIStatusBarStyle:

typedef NS_ENUM(NSInteger, UIStatusBarStyle) {
    UIStatusBarStyleDefault                                     = 0, // Dark content, for use on light backgrounds
    UIStatusBarStyleLightContent     NS_ENUM_AVAILABLE_IOS(7_0) = 1, // Light content, for use on dark backgrounds
    UIStatusBarStyleBlackTranslucent NS_ENUM_DEPRECATED_IOS(2_0, 7_0, "Use UIStatusBarStyleLightContent") = 1,
    UIStatusBarStyleBlackOpaque      NS_ENUM_DEPRECATED_IOS(2_0, 7_0, "Use UIStatusBarStyleLightContent") = 2,
};

We can see from this that UIStatusBarStyleLightContent is the same value as UIStatusBarStyleBlackTranslucent, so those will be the respective behaviors on iOS 6 and 7 if either of those are used.

If you wanted to, you could use code to detect the iOS version and choose a different value between the two, in case you wanted the light content style on iOS 7, but black opaque or default on iOS 6.

Also, there's now a property that you add to the Info.plist called UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance that will make it so it will change the style based on the preference of the UIViewController using the - (UIStatusBarStyle)preferredStatusBarStyle method. So you just override that method in your UIViewController subclass with the style you want in that specific place.