UITableView backgroundColor always white on iPad

Good News: According to the release notes, for iOS 10:

When running on iPad, the background color set for a UITableViewCell in a Storyboard is now respected.

For versions <10:

I was seeing this in iOS 8 (8.3). Even though in IB my cells were "clear color" and their content views were "clear color" they would render as white. An imperfect but reasonable solution, since it still takes values from IB:

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    ...
    cell.backgroundColor = cell.contentView.backgroundColor;
    return cell;
}

It seems that my dequeued reuseable cells get their background forced to white on iPad. I was able to determine this using the view hierarchy debugger.

Once I did this I was able to use the table's background color and didn't have to set a background view, although that works as well.

You can fix this by making an appearance API setting in your appDelegate file :

Swift:

UITableViewCell.appearance().backgroundColor = UIColor.clearColor()