Share extension status bars don’t respect preferredStatusBarStyle

[irace]

• Radar #17916449 (sample project)

The Tumblr share extension – like its container application – has a dark blue background color. White looks great on dark blue. Black, not so much.

We tried everything, but couldn’t find a way for our share extension (which uses a custom view controller subclass, as opposed to SLComposeServiceViewController) to specify its status bar style. Instead, we always get the status bar style of the host application. Since we’re expecting Photos.app and Safari – both which have black status bars – to be two of the apps that Tumblr users share from the most, this is really disappointing.

Workaround

None so far. Neither Info.plist keys nor view controller methods worked, and we couldn’t even get a handle to the keyboard window the way that applications can usually accomplish using private API (Sam Giddins nearly went insane trying. Thanks Sam!). Here’s hoping for a way to do this in iOS 8.1.

[aclissold]

I wonder if it'd be possible to use snapshotViewAfterScreenUpdates:, hide the real status bar, and modify the image of the status bar directly… but that definitely sounds like way more work than this problem warrants!

[segiddins]

@aclissold we couldn't even hide the status bar, so that approach wouldn't work.