How do I save a UIColor with UserDefaults?

Swift 5.2 or later

Note that this will save only the RGBA CGFloat values as Data inside the property list. This will use 32 bytes (raw data) instead of 424 bytes needed when using the standard approach with NSKeyedUnarchiver (NSCoding):

extension Numeric {
    var data: Data {
        var bytes = self
        return Data(bytes: &bytes, count: MemoryLayout<Self>.size)
    }
}

---

extension Data {
    func object<T>() -> T { withUnsafeBytes{$0.load(as: T.self)} }
    var color: UIColor { .init(data: self) }
}

---

extension UIColor {
    convenience init(data: Data) {
        let size = MemoryLayout<CGFloat>.size
        self.init(red:   data.subdata(in: size*0..<size*1).object(),
                  green: data.subdata(in: size*1..<size*2).object(),
                  blue:  data.subdata(in: size*2..<size*3).object(),
                  alpha: data.subdata(in: size*3..<size*4).object())
    }
    var rgba: (red: CGFloat, green: CGFloat, blue: CGFloat, alpha: CGFloat)? {
        var (red, green, blue, alpha): (CGFloat, CGFloat, CGFloat, CGFloat) = (0, 0, 0, 0)
        return getRed(&red, green: &green, blue: &blue, alpha: &alpha) ?
        (red, green, blue, alpha) : nil
    }
    var data: Data? {
        guard let rgba = rgba else { return nil }
        return rgba.red.data + rgba.green.data + rgba.blue.data + rgba.alpha.data
    }
}

---

extension UserDefaults {
    func set(_ color: UIColor?, forKey defaultName: String) {
        guard let data = color?.data else {
            removeObject(forKey: defaultName)
            return
        }
        set(data, forKey: defaultName)
    }
    func color(forKey defaultName: String) -> UIColor? {
        data(forKey: defaultName)?.color
    }
}

---

extension UserDefaults {
    var backgroundColor: UIColor? {
        get { color(forKey: "backgroundColor") }
        set { set(newValue, forKey: "backgroundColor") }
    }
}

---

UserDefaults.standard.backgroundColor = .red
UserDefaults.standard.backgroundColor  // r 1.0 g 0.0 b 0.0 a 1.0