iOS 7 and later: set status bar style per view controller

Have you tried this?

1. Set "View controller-based status bar appearance" (UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance) to YES in your Info.plist. (YES is the default, so you can also just leave this value out of your plist.)

2. In your viewDidLoad method, call [self setNeedsStatusBarAppearanceUpdate].

3. Implement preferredStatusBarStyle, returning the status bar style that you want for this view controller.

   - (UIStatusBarStyle) preferredStatusBarStyle { 
       return UIStatusBarStyleLightContent; 
   }
   

There is a catch here if your view controller is inside standalone UINavigationController and not a part of Storyboard based UINavigationController then above all methods fail. I came across this situation and then in order to set the status bar to light style i used following

[self.navigationController.navigationBar setBarStyle:UIBarStyleBlack];

This worked perfectly for me.