UITextField in UIAlertController (border, backgroundColor)

here is the important part in swift:

for textfield: UIView in alertController.textfields {
   var container: UIView = textField.superview
   var effectView: UIView = container.superview.subviews[0]
   container.backgroundColor = UIColor.clearColor()
   effectView.removeFromSuperview()
}

Had some fun with this. The following seems to work. Obviously judging by what was required, it has no future proofing and is a patch away from not working.

I figured this out by walking the view hierarchy in the debugger, from which I noticed a UIVisualEffectView. Removing that seems to give you what you want along with setting the containing view to a clear background. Without removing the visual effect, a clear background shows what is behind the alert view itself for some reason.

UIAlertController *alertController = 
 [UIAlertController alertControllerWithTitle:@"Its Not Pretty!" 
                                     message:@"Some times things get ugly!"                          
                              preferredStyle:UIAlertControllerStyleAlert];

[alertController addTextFieldWithConfigurationHandler:^(UITextField *textField){
    textField.text = @"Text: No border and clear 8^)";

 }];
[self presentViewController:alertController animated:TRUE completion:^{
}];

for (UIView* textfield in alertController.textfields) {
    UIView *container = textField.superview;
    UIView *effectView = container.superview.subviews[0];

    if (effectView && [effectView class] == [UIVisualEffectView class]){
        container.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
        [effectView removeFromSuperview];
    }
}