Hiding status bar still shows opaque placeholder on ios

I’m trying to achieve a full screen look to the app as a whole, not just on certain views.

...
import { StatusBar } from '@ionic-native/status-bar';
...

import { HomePage } from '../pages/home/home';
@Component({
  templateUrl: 'app.html'
})
export class MyApp {
  rootPage:any = HomePage;

  constructor(platform: Platform, statusBar: StatusBar, splashScreen: SplashScreen) {
    platform.ready().then(() => {
      statusBar.hide();
      splashScreen.hide();
    });
  }
}

This code hides the status bar but as you can see in the image below there is still a placeholder area with an opaque background in place so the app view is not truly fullscreen / the status bar is not really gone just hidden.
I’ve scrolled my content a bit so you can see there is an opaque bar there and not just that the window height is not full screen.
What do I need to do to get this to work?