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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T05:48:03+00:00

I have seen a lot of posts on stack overflow stating that the viewDidLoad

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I have seen a lot of posts on stack overflow stating that the viewDidLoad method of controllers is only called the first time the controller is accessed and not necessarily every time but always at least once.

This is not what I am seeing at all! I put together a simple test to highlight this:
https://github.com/imuz/ViewDidLoadTest

It seems for navigation controller segues and modal views viewDidLoad is always called. The only time it is not called is when switching between tabs.

Every explanation of viewDidLoad I can find contradicts this:

And apples own documentation indicate that a view is only unloaded when memory is low.

I am currently doing initialisation in viewDidLoad making the assumption that it is called with every segue transition.

Am I missing something here?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I believe the Apple documentation is describing a situation where the view controller is not being deallocated. If you use a segue, then you are causing the instantiation of a new destination controller and, being a new object, it needs to load a view.

    In xib-based apps, I have sometimes cached a controller object that I knew I might re-use frequently. In those cases, they behaved in keeping with the documentation in terms of when a view had to be loaded.

    Edit:
    On reading the links you included, I don’t see any contradiction in them. They, too, are talking about things that happen during the lifespan of a view controller object.

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