How to close this bottom bar in iOS9 simulator?

help you fix your problem @Fantina @Goles I was able to temporarily fix this by creating and adding a Default-568h@2x.png file with resolution 640x1136. I then updated the 'App Icons and Launch Images' Section to look like this:

This might help you Ugh. Being new to ios development I was 100% certain my code was borked, which was causing the keyboard not to appear. So this morning I created a test project and added each line of code from my project to the test project to see which was causing the perceived breakage.
After all the code was added back, I re-compiled the test project again, and it worked. Same exact code as the normal project, wtf? So then I realized there must be some caching anomaly that is causing the issue, and sure enough I found this post on how to clear Xcode cache. After clearing the cache I re-loaded my project, re-compiled, and sure enough, my project worked as expected.