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I've just updated my Galaxy S3 to the OTA 4.3 update and whilst its fine, there are a couple of really annoying niggles.

The main one is the notification bar at the top - where the little icons are shown. This used to be black with white icons and they were easily visible.

Now its transparent.

I use a nice landscape image as my wallpaper, so I have pale blue sky and white clouds, and you can imagine the white icons on white cloud background isn't exactly what I'd call usable. short of editing my wallpapers to have a black bar at the top, is there a way to revert this?

It seems the update is fine but for the lock screen that has so many pointless changes that result in usability problems I'm tempted to downgrade.

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  • You could install a 3rd party launcher, but the lockscreen will not revert to black without a third party lockscreen. Touchwiz may override this even so. It does on the S4 most of the time. You may not be able to downgrade if you have a Knox bootloader I'm afriad. Kitkat is now transparent statusbar by default so this is the general trend. Samusng introduced it with 4.2.2 on the S4 as AMOLED screens are prone to 'burn in' and the black bar had to go. It's not pointless, what I think is a bit pointless is not giving users the option for what they want, but it was done for a reason.
    – RossC
    Jan 24, 2014 at 12:08
  • @RossC thanks. An option to change the text colour would have been nice.. I guess they're not bothered by burn-in of the little battery, signal, smarteye, wifi icons :)
    – gbjbaanb
    Jan 24, 2014 at 13:26

1 Answer 1

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From what you said in the comments above, there is a way to change the text colour & the icon colours along with the colour / transparency of the status bar.

It requires a rooted phone unfortunately but once rooted download WANAM Xposed from the play store here is a link Wanam Xposed work's on Samsung Android 4.2+ so you shouldn't have any issues

Once this is installed it will ask you to install the Xposed Framework, don't be alarmed it is required and will not harm your phone. Once the framework is installed you'll be prompted to enable Wanam Xposed from the new Xposed Installer, if not you can simply click on Xposed Installer, Click Modules and Wanam Xposed should appear and check the checkbox.

Now go on Wanam Xposed, note everytime you make a change it will only appear after a Reboot!

You can now go on Theme and click either Background Color (or Colour as it should be :) ) and this will enable you to select a colour for the status bar, or you can click on the following

  • Circle Battery Color
  • Stock Battery Text color
  • Signal Icons Color
  • Clock And Date Color
  • Status bar icons color (remaining icons)

Each of these will change the icons instead of the status bar background colour

Hope this helps!

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