UITabBarItem icon not colored correctly for iOS 13 when a bar tint color is specified in Interface Builder in Xcode 11, beta 2

Question

I have a problem with the color of my UITabBarItems when I run on iOS 13 simulators, using Xcode 11, beta 2. I have made a sample project from scratch, and everything works

Answer 1

For Objective C you can use in AppDelegate:

[[UITabBar appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor whiteColor]];
[[UITabBar appearance] setUnselectedItemTintColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:255.0f/255.0f green:255.0f/255.0f blue:255.0f/255.0f alpha:0.65f]];

Answer 2

Use the attribute field "Image Tint" in IB.

Answer 3

There is a new appearance API in iOS 13. To color tabbar item's icon and text correctly using Xcode 11.0 you can use it like this:

    if #available(iOS 13, *) {
        let appearance = UITabBarAppearance()

        appearance.backgroundColor = .white
        appearance.shadowImage = UIImage()
        appearance.shadowColor = .white

        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.normal.iconColor = .black
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.normal.titleTextAttributes = [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.black]
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.normal.badgeBackgroundColor = .blue

        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.selected.iconColor = .red
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.selected.titleTextAttributes = [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.red]

        self.tabBar.standardAppearance = appearance

    } 

Answer 4

On the surface, this might seem like a bug, however you can mitigate it by defining an .unselectedItemTintColor on your UITabBar instance.

self.tabBar.unselectedItemTintColor = [UIColor lightGrayColor];

Answer 5

self.tabBarController?.tabBar.unselectedItemTintColor = UIColor.lightGray

This works for me in swift 4. Just put this in the override func viewWillDisappear(_ animated: Bool) method and this will update as the view is changing.

So it will look something like this

override func viewWillDisappear(_ animated: Bool) {
    self.tabBarController?.tabBar.unselectedItemTintColor = UIColor.lightGray
}

Even if this is a bug(I'm not sure) you can use this to change the color of the tab bar item by using any color of you choice

Answer 6

    if #available(iOS 13.0, *) {
        let appearance = tabBar.standardAppearance
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.normal.titleTextAttributes = [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.black]
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.selected.titleTextAttributes = [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor: UIColor.blue]
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.normal.iconColor = UIColor.black
        appearance.stackedLayoutAppearance.selected.iconColor = UIColor.blue
        tabBar.standardAppearance = appearance
    } else {
        tabBar.unselectedItemTintColor = UIColor.black
        tabBar.tintColor = UIColor.blue
    }