How to use light text color in the status bar

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

As of iOS 7.0, all view controllers set their own status bar style by default, which means they can have black text or white text depending on what looks best for your view controller. If you want to have light text in the status bar, add this code to your view controller:

override var preferredStatusBarStyle: UIStatusBarStyle {
    return .lightContent
}

If you want to change the status bar color dynamically, you should call setNeedsStatusBarAppearanceUpdate() on your view controller, which will force preferredStatusBarStyle to be read again. Pro tip: you can put setNeedsStatusBarAppearanceUpdate() inside an animation block to have the change animate.