iOS 7 TabBar Translucent issue

As mentioned here you have to set barTintColor to something you want to change the color.

These settings automatically apply when you set any style for barStyle or any custom color for barTintColor. If you prefer, you can make the tab bar opaque by setting the translucent property to NO programmatically. In this case, the bar draws an opaque background using black if the tab bar has UIBarStyleBlack style, white if the tab bar has UIBarStyleDefault, or the tab bar’s barTintColor if a custom value is defined.

Something that I used for my project

self.tabBarController.tabBar.barTintColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:1.0 green:0.0 blue:0.0 alpha:1.0];

self.tabBarController.tabBar.translucent = NO;

This happens in iOS7 when you set tabBar.translucent to NO. iOS is trying to be smart and say "hey the tabbar is not translucent so we better push everything up on top of it". Fix it by setting the extendedLayoutIncludesOpaqueBars property of the view controller inside the navigation controller which is inside the tabbar controller to YES.

Example (not actually ran):

UITabBarController *tabBarController = [[UITabBarController alloc] init];
tabBarController.tabBar.barStyle = UIBarStyleBlack;
tabBarController.tabBar.translucent = NO;

UIViewController *viewController = [[UIViewController alloc] init];
viewController.extendedLayoutIncludesOpaqueBars = YES; // <-- This is important!!!!!!

UINavigationController *navigationController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController: viewController];

tabBarController.viewControllers = @[navigationController];

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160405135605/https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/TransitionGuide/AppearanceCustomization.html

And BTW, I like the non-translucent tabbar the best.

Edit

As Andy mentioned below, this flag does not have to be set in code. You can set it in IB if that's what you use.