Getting reference to the top-most view/window in iOS application

Whenever I want to display some overlay on top of everything else, I just add it on top of the Application Window directly:

[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] addSubview:someView]

There are two parts of the problem: Top window, top view on top window.

All the existing answers missed the top window part. But [[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] is not guaranteed to be the top window.

1. Top window. It is very unlikely that there will be two windows with the same windowLevel coexist for an app, so we can sort all the windows by windowLevel and get the topmost one.

   UIWindow *topWindow = [[[UIApplication sharedApplication].windows sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(UIWindow *win1, UIWindow *win2) {    return win1.windowLevel - win2.windowLevel;}] lastObject];

2. Top view on top window. Just to be complete. As already pointed out in the question:

   UIView *topView = [[topWindow subviews] lastObject];

Usually that will give you the top view, but there's no guarantee that it's visible to the user. It could be off the screen, have an alpha of 0.0, or could be have size of 0x0 for example.

It could also be that the keyWindow has no subviews, so you should probably test for that first. This would be unusual, but it's not impossible.

UIWindow is a subclass of UIView, so if you want to make sure your notification is visible to the user, you can add it directly to the keyWindow using addSubview: and it will instantly be the top most view. I'm not sure if this is what you're looking to do though. (Based on your question, it looks like you already know this.)