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

In Swift I was able to do this by writing:

let tbc : UITabBarController = self.window?.rootViewController as UITabBarController
var moreViewController : UINavigationController = tbc.moreNavigationController

moreViewController.navigationBar.barStyle = UIBarStyle.Black

Basically you're interested in the last line.
This resulted in tabbar changing to white:

Note that I didn't change anything in Info.plist in order to achieve this result.
For more informations regarding changing Navigation Status Bar, please check out this link: http://www.appcoda.com/customize-navigation-status-bar-ios-7/

EDIT: This solution is deprecated on iOS 9. Please choose one of the other answers.

With UIViewControllerBasedStatusBarAppearance set to NO, I was able to set the style to white text by using:

[UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarStyle = UIStatusBarStyleBlackTranslucent;

This is because the text color on this style was white on iOS 6 and below.

UPDATE: According to @jowie you can try that on iOS8:

[UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarStyle = UIBarStyleBlack;

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.

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; 
   }