UITextField has a .placeholder text property, for showing info before text has been added to the field, up until now it's always been clear and visible, but in iOS13 dark mode was introduced and now placeholder text is practically unreadable in a white UITextField (I am explicitly making it white via .backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor]).
My question is, what are some practical solutions to fix this throughout my project, I could manually change the placeholder color on any UITextField manually, by simply setting an attributedPlaceholder string, that may take a while, is there a way to disable dark mode settings just on UITextFields specifically but not for other elements?
It turns out Apple has provided a way to override this on various elements (or even your entire app's UIWindow) with the following (Objective-C):
if (@available(iOS 13.0, *)) {
textField.overrideUserInterfaceStyle = UIUserInterfaceStyleLight;
}
I applied it to all UITextFields via swizzle, to turn it off on EVERYTHING in your project, just use this in your appDelegate didFinishLaunching method but replace textField with _window
(IMPORTANT EDIT: with the newest version of xCode _window seems to have been dropped and now app projects create something called a SceneDelegate and the overrideUserInterfaceStyle has to be applied to that somehow, but I'm new to scene delegates and don't know how they work so I can't offer much help there, to disable scenedelegate and return to traditional AppDelegate management of the UIWindow, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57467270/2057171)