iOS Memory Management FAQ

• What is Memory management in iOS?

Memory management is the programming discipline of managing the life cycles of objects and freeing them when they are no longer needed. Managing object memory is a matter of performance; if an application doesn’t free unneeded objects, its memory footprint grows and performance suffers. Memory management in a Cocoa application that doesn’t use garbage collection is based on a reference counting model. When you create or copy an object, its retain count is 1. Thereafter other objects may express an ownership interest in your object, which increments its retain count. The owners of an object may also relinquish their ownership interest in it, which decrements the retain count. When the retain count becomes zero, the object is deallocated (destroyed).