Question

In Programming iOS 4 by Matt Newburg he states:

“To provide a UIViewController with a view manually, implement its
loadView method… You must NOT call super”.

In the iOS 5 Developer’s Cookbook by Erica Sadun she states:

“The loadView method allows you to set up the screen and layout any
subviews… Make sure to call [super loadView] whenever you inherit
from a specialized subclass such as UITableViewController or
UITabBarController.”

This, to me at least, is confusing.

Answer 1

Apple is the source of truth and they say NO super call.

If you override this method in order to create your views manually,
you should do so and assign the root view of your hierarchy to the
view property. (The views you create should be unique instances and
should not be shared with any other view controller object.) Your
custom implementation of this method should not call super.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontroller/1621454-loadview

[edit]

Another important note scattered around in the UIViewController class reference:

The default loadView method attempts to load the view from the nib
file associated with the view controller (if any).