Testing with the Extended Status Bar

iOS Simulator comes with a number of debug options to assist you in testing your iPhone and iPad apps. Two of of my favorite and most used options are found near the bottom of iOS Simulator’s Hardware menu: Simulate Memory Warning and Toggle In-Call Status Bar. We haven’t yet covered the in-call status bar and it’s often and overlooked and under-tested scenario that deserves some attention.

Toggle In-Call Status Bar simply enables the double-height status bar that users would normally see when they are on a call outside of the phone app. The extended status bar also appears with other background processes like tethering, voice recordings, Garage Band recordings, and Skype calls, among others. Because of the increasing number of apps that will cause this extended status bar to appear, it’s becoming more and more likely that your users will be using your app in such a scenario, and therefore increasingly important that you test for such scenarios.

There are a few different scenarios for testing the extended status bar in each view: turning on the extended status bar while you’re in a view, turning it on prior to going into a view, disabling it while you’re in a view, and disabling it while you’re out of a view. Just because a view handles one of these properly doesn’t mean it will look good in all of these scenarios. Getting familiar with the ⌘-Y shortcut to enable and disable the extended status bar will help this testing go pretty quickly.

For most apps the main thing to look for when enabling the extended status bar is checking to make sure you can still scroll to the bottom of the view and nothing is being cut off. Another bug that commonly manifests is having a blank area at the top or bottom of the view that shows up when turning off the extended status bar. While many users may never even encounter these scenarios while using your app, those who do will appreciate your attention to detail if you handle these scenarios properly. Even if they don’t notice, at least they won’t be leaving you a one star review for bugs like having the back button half covered by the status bar.