Hi everyone, I just started my studies on Compose Multiplatform. I come from an Android background, and I know nothing about iOS. So, I’m working on a personal project, and I was trying to change the color of the status bar on both platforms based on the theme. The Android side was easy, but I struggled on the iOS side. I couldn’t find a clear path to this, and I came up with this solution based on some approaches to changing the color of the status bar in Swift. I don’t know if there is another way to do this. I would appreciate any advice, thanks!

// main.android.kt
@Composable
actual fun setStatusBarColor(color: Color, isDark: Boolean) {
    val view = LocalView.current
    if (!view.isInEditMode) {
        SideEffect {
            val window = (view.context as Activity).window
            window.statusBarColor = color.toArgb()
            WindowCompat.getInsetsController(window, view).isAppearanceLightStatusBars = !isDark
        }
    }
}

// main.ios.kt
@Composable
actual fun setStatusBarColor(color: Color, isDark: Boolean) {
    val statusBarColor = UIColor(
        CIColor(
            color.red.toDouble(),
            color.green.toDouble(),
            color.green.toDouble(),
            color.alpha.toDouble(),
        ),
    )

    UIApplication
        .sharedApplication
        .keyWindow
        ?.windowScene
        ?.statusBarManager
        ?.statusBarFrame()
        ?.let {
            UIView(it)
        }?.apply {
            setBackgroundColor(statusBarColor)
        }?.let {
            UIApplication.sharedApplication.keyWindow?.addSubview(it)
        }
}

Unfortunately this is the only way to do this iOS 13+. Previous versions were a bit more simple but now this is the right way. Custom themed color for safe area in iOS is a bit of a headache because iOS intentionally wants apps to adhere to black/white for safe area.

Great! Thanks 🙂