iOS 7 Phonegap Change Background Color of Status Bar

Hello,

Recently I was working on Sencha Touch, Phonegap application where we have a requirement to change background color of top status bar of iPhone where we have carrier, wifi and battery symbols. There are two ways to do it. In this blog I will explain both the steps.

First Step

In iOS 7 if you have status bar visible your UI will overlap the status bar and we will take advantage of it. First select your project and go to Deployment info. Make sure you have Hide during application launch checkbox and set status bar style as default.

Now your webview will overlap the UI and the status bar will be transparent. So we can add a component on top of our page with height 20 pixel and preferred background color so your status bar will have same background color. For example I added docked panel in Sencha Touch with fixed height and background color in my main container. 

Ext.define('MyApp.view.LaunchView', {

    extend : 'Ext.Panel',

    xtype : 'launchmain',

    config : {

        layout : 'card',

        

           items : [{

                    xtype: 'panel',

                    docked: 'top',

                    style: {

                        'background-color': '#34495E',

                        'color':'#ffffff'

                    },

                    height: 20

                    

           }]

    }

});

Since this is may main container all the views added in this container will have this panel and top. Now issue could be if you have some external pages loaded in app on which you don't have control then this panel will not be there you can not have top component with background color. For that follow step 2

Second Step

Here in this step we will add component on top of our webview in our main iOS 7 view. Hence it will be available throughout the app. For that add following code in didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method of AppDelegate.m

 if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 7.0) {

        UIView *topView = [[UIView alloc] init];

CGRect screenRect = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds];

        topView.frame = CGRectMake(0, 0, screenRect.size.width, 20);

        topView.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:52/255. green:73/255. blue:94/255. alpha:1];

        [self.window.rootViewController.view addSubview: topView];

    }

Here we are added another view with required background color on top of webview. Now we have to shift down webview for 20 pixel so that this view would be visible. For that add following code to viewDidLoad function of your MainViewController.m file. 

if ([[[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] floatValue] >= 7) {

        CGRect viewBounds = [self.webView bounds];

        viewBounds.origin.y = 20;

        viewBounds.size.height = viewBounds.size.height - 20;

        self.webView.frame = viewBounds;

    }

As you can see in above code we are changing the origin of webview and shift it 20 pixel down. You can simply add above code to avoid overlapping of UI.