Is it possible to disable Control Center in iOS 7 programmatically and if not, what are alternatives?

Question

I have developed an app that uses swipe gesture from bottom up. It was working perfectly in iOS 6, but now iOS 7 came out, and it works maybe 1 out of 25 times: i get iOS 7

Answer 1

Starting with the iOS 11 SDK (compiled in Xcode 9) additionally to implementing prefersStatusBarHidden:

Objective-C:

- (BOOL) prefersStatusBarHidden
{
    return YES;
} 

Swift 4+:

override var prefersStatusBarHidden: Bool { return true }

you also need to implement preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures:

Objective-C:

- (UIRectEdge)preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures{
    return UIRectEdgeAll;
};

Swift 4+:

override func preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures() -> UIRectEdge {
    return .all
}

Otherwise the Control/Notification Center appear directly; instead of first showing the gray box with a up/down arrow that needs to be dragged up/down.