Configuring the status bar

Learn how to configure the status bar using expo-status-bar library.

The status bar is a small detail that can make a big difference in the overall feel and perceived level of polish of your app by users. When you have a white status bar on the white background, you know something isn't going quite right.

This guide provides the tools to configure the status bar for your Android and iOS apps.

Notice how bad the contrast is between the status bar text and the background in the second image. This is what you want to try to avoid.

Configure the status bar while app is loading (Android only)

This type of configuration is currently only available on Android. On iOS, it is impossible in the Expo Go app to customize the status bar before the app has loaded, while the splash screen is presented.

Configuring the status bar while the splash screen is visible on Android is available through the androidStatusBar object in the app config. The options available are similar to those provided by expo-status-bar.

Update the status bar while app is running

The StatusBar component provided by expo-status-bar allows you to control the appearance of the status bar while your app is running. expo-status-bar also provides imperative methods such as setStatusBarStyle(style) to control the style through function calls rather than the StatusBar component, if you find that to be helpful for your use case.

To fix the contrast issue from the screenshot at the top of this guide, we could use the following code:

import { StatusBar } from 'expo-status-bar';

export default function Playlists() {
  return (
    <>
      {%%placeholder-start%%...%%placeholder-end%%} {}
      {/* Use light text instead of dark text in the status bar to provide more contrast with a dark background. */}
      <StatusBar style="light" />
    </>
  );
}

Themes and status bar styles

If you use expo-status-bar to control your status bar style, the style="auto" configuration will automatically pick the appropriate default style depending on the color scheme currently used by the app (this is the default behavior if you leave out the style prop entirely then auto will be used). Note that if you provide a way for users to toggle between color schemes rather than using the operating system theme, this will not have the intended behavior, and you should use style="light" and style="dark" as needed depending on the selected color scheme.

Render the status bar in with your layout

When you have a translucent status bar, it's important to remember that content can be rendered underneath it.

Libraries like React Navigation will handle this for you when the UI they provide overlaps with the status bar. You are likely to encounter cases where you will need to manually adjust your layout to prevent some content (such as text) from being rendered underneath it. To do this, it is recommended to use react-native-safe-area-context to find the safe area insets and add padding or margins to your layout accordingly.

Work with misbehaving third-party Libraries

Projects initialized with Expo tools make the status bar translucent by default on Android. This is consistent with iOS and more in line with material design. Unfortunately, some libraries don't support translucent status bars. This is generally bad practice and those libraries should be fixed. However, if you must use one of them, there are some options available for you to accommodate their limitations:

Opaque-colored background

Setting solely backgroundColor to an opaque color will disable the transparency of the status bar, however, preserve translucency. You need to explicitly set translucent to false if you want your app's status bar to take up space on the device's screen. This is a good option if your status bar color never needs to change, for example:

{
  "expo": {
    "androidStatusBar": {
      "backgroundColor": "#C2185B",
      "translucent": false
    }
  }
}

Empty View

You can place an empty View on top of your screen with a background color to act as a status bar or set the top padding. You can get the height of the status bar (and notch, if there is one) by using the top inset value provided by react-native-safe-area-context.