Ios – how to reduce/remove the left/right hand margin in a grouped UITableView

All you have to do is set the selection style on the UITableViewCell instance using either:

Objective-C:

cell.selectionStyle = UITableViewCellSelectionStyleNone;

or

[cell setSelectionStyle:UITableViewCellSelectionStyleNone];

Swift 2:

cell.selectionStyle = UITableViewCellSelectionStyle.None

Swift 3 and 4.x:

cell.selectionStyle = .none

Further, make sure you either don't implement -tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath: in your table view delegate or explicitly exclude the cells you want to have no action if you do implement it.

More info here and here

A better and cleaner way to achieve this is subclassing UITableViewCell and overriding its -setFrame: method like this:

- (void)setFrame:(CGRect)frame {
    frame.origin.x += inset;
    frame.size.width -= 2 * inset;
    [super setFrame:frame];
}

Why is it better? Because the other two are worse.

1. Adjust table view width in -viewWillAppear:

   First of all, this is unreliable, the superview or parent view controller may adjust table view frame further after -viewWillAppear: is called. Of course, you can subclass and override -setFrame: for your UITableView just like what I do here for UITableViewCells. However, subclassing UITableViewCells is a much common, light, and Apple way.

   Secondly, if your UITableView have backgroundView, you don't want its backgroundView be narrowed down together. Keeping backgroundView width while narrow down UITableView width is not trivial work, not to mention that expanding subviews beyond its superview is not a very elegant thing to do in the first place.

2. Custom cell rendering to fake a narrower width

   To do this, you have to prepare special background images with horizontal margins, and you have to layout subviews of cells yourself to accommodate the margins. In comparison, if you simply adjust the width of the whole cell, autoresizing will do all the works for you.