Deprecation of 'statusBarFrame'

Introduction

Developers who are working on iOS applications may be familiar with the statusBarFrame property, which returns the frame rectangle of the application's status bar. However, this property has been deprecated since iOS 13, and developers are advised to use the windowScene property of the UIScene class instead.

Why Was It Deprecated?

The statusBarFrame property was deprecated because it fails to account for changes in the status bar during the lifecycle of an application. Prior to iOS 13, the status bar had a single size and position on the screen. However, with the introduction of new device types and screen sizes, the status bar can now change size and position depending on different factors such as device orientation, display mode, and more.

As a result, it became necessary to deprecate the statusBarFrame property in favor of a more reliable way to determine the size and position of the status bar.

What Should You Use Instead?

To determine the size and position of the status bar, developers are encouraged to use the windowScene property of the UIScene class. This property returns an instance of the UIWindowScene class, which provides information about the current window scene, including the status bar.

For example, to get the frame rectangle of the status bar in the current window scene, developers can use the following code snippet:

if let windowScene = UIApplication.shared.connectedScenes.first as? UIWindowScene {
    let statusBarFrame = windowScene.statusBarManager?.statusBarFrame ?? CGRect.zero
}

This code snippet first retrieves the current window scene using the connectedScenes property of the UIApplication class. It then gets the statusBarManager property of the window scene, which returns an instance of the UIStatusBarManager class that contains information about the current status bar. Finally, it gets the statusBarFrame property of the UIStatusBarManager instance to retrieve the frame rectangle of the status bar.

Using this approach, developers can accurately determine the size and position of the status bar in their iOS applications.