How to definitively set UITabBar background color and tint color

Question

I have been trying to set my UITabBar's tint color and background color for quite some time now and nothing seems to work. So far I have tried:

tabBarController?.tabBar.backgroundColor = UIColor.orangeColor()
tabBarController?.tabBar.barTintColor = UIColor.whiteColor()

as well as:

UITabBar.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.orangeColor()

Neither of these seemed to have any effect on my tab bar. I'd also like to mention that I have the VC embedded in a navigation controller for which the global tint color that I set works perfectly fine.

Answer 1

If you want to set tabbar's tint and barTint color implicitly then in your Appdelegate.swift,

    UITabBar.appearance().barTintColor = .orange
    UITabBar.appearance().tintColor = .green

If you want to set tabbar's tint and barTint color for specific viewController then in ViewController.swift,

 self.tabBarController?.tabBar.tintColor = .orange
 self.tabBarController?.tabBar.barTintColor = .green

Answer 2

Set tab bar background color with barTintColor:

self.tabBar.barTintColor = UIColor.blueColor()
//or
UITabBar.appearance().barTintColor = UIColor.blueColor()

And for tab bar tint color:

self.tabBar.tintColor = UIColor.whiteColor() // Selected tab color
//or
UITabBar.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.whiteColor()

Answer 3

In similar fashion to how UINavigationBar is by default transparent on iOS 15 when there is no content behind it, the UITabBar works the same way. This might either be a nice visual refresh you get for free (since it is turned on by default once you build with Xcode 13) or it might cause a lot of issues for your app.

if #available(iOS 13.0, *) { 
    let tabBarAppearance: UITabBarAppearance = UITabBarAppearance() 
    tabBarAppearance.configureWithDefaultBackground() 
    tabBarAppearance.backgroundColor = UIColor.tabBarBackground 
    UITabBar.appearance().standardAppearance = tabBarAppearance 
}
if #available(iOS 15.0, *) { 
    UITabBar.appearance().scrollEdgeAppearance = tabBarAppearance 
}