XamaWIN – Changing the statusbar color in iOS

Xamawin • zam-ah win | noun
A quick, easy to implement enhancement for a Xamarin App that improves performance, appearance, or functionality

This XamaWIN, like they often do, comes after an embarrassing amount of time searching for a simple thing: changing the color of the statusbar text for iOS. By default, the text color is black until you add a new key to info.plist: UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
	<string>net.iwcs.sample</string>
	<key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
	<string>1.0.3.2</string>
	[...]
	<key>UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance</key>
	<false/>
</dict>
</plist>

I prefer to edit the xml directly, but you can also do this via the handy visual editor:

Then, just set the color wherever you initialize your NavigationPage, like so:

	MainPage = new NavigationPage(new HomePage())
	{
		BarTextColor = Color.White,
		BarBackgroundColor = Color.FromHex("#394A76"),
	};

The result looks fantastic. Check out the side-by-side below:

Credit to Trevi Awater for sharing the answer on this Stack Overflow post!