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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T20:36:10+00:00

I still don’t get it why Apple discourages the old method of doing animations

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I still don’t get it why Apple discourages the old method of doing animations and instead says to use blocks.

I mean, how does one realistically stop using the old way? Aren’t blocks iOS > 4.0 only? Is one supposed to fill the code with ifs and make two different implementations based on the current device’s system version? And why do so since the old method works just fine? Plus the underlying implementation should be the same, right? Is there any reasoning behind this aside from the fact that begin/commit produces ugly code?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I still don’t get it why Apple
    discourages the old method of doing
    animations and instead says to use
    blocks.

    Apple wants you to use the latest and greatest techniques. Apple will optimize all it’s new iOS releases for the block based animations and probably will add new possibilities only to the blocks based animations. So thats why Apple is pushing you to the block based animations.

    I mean, how does one realistically stop using the old way? Aren’t blocks iOS > 4.0 only?

    Yes, blocks are iOS > 4.0 only. So if your App is designed for iOS 4.0+ only you can use block based animations. Or you could check for the availability of blocks and add the specific animation only for the iOS 4.0+ devices.

    Completely stop animating the old way is only realistic if you drop support for iOS 3.

    Is one supposed to fill the code with ifs and make two different implementations based on the current device’s system version? And why do so since the old method works just fine? Plus the underlying implementation should be the same, right? Is there any reasoning behind this aside from the fact that begin/commit produces ugly code?

    Well, if the old method is okay for you and you want to support older (iOS 3) devices. Just use the old way of animating. There’s nothing wrong with it, don’t put unnecessary if-statements in your code. It only makes things complicated and you win nothing by doing it.

    If your App is iOS 4 go with blocks, it’s shorter and somewhat cleaned. It also should be easier to maintain, because Apple will not keep updating the old way of animating.

    (You always can add the if-statements somewhere in the future if there will be animations you only can do with blocks, and then fallback to another less complex animation with the old methods. But thats something for the future.)

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