Cocoa and the iPhone

In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone and iPod Touch, handheld devices running a cut-down version of OS X. These run the Foundation part of Cocoa, but not AppKit. Instead, they use UIKit, a framework designed for small formfactor devices. UIKit is based on a lot of the same concepts as AppKit, and a lot of AppKit classes have direct analogues in UIKit. Unlike desktop OS X, iPhone OS X does not need to support legacy applications. It is a completely new platform, and Apple took this opportunity to break a lot of legacy features. You can think of UIKit as a cleaned-up version of AppKit. New additions to AppKit share a lot more in common with UIKit than they do with older parts of AppKit. Because UIKit and AppKit have a large overlapping subset, it is easy for developers familiar with one to move to the other. It is also easy to port code between the two. A number of the more advanced desktop frameworks are not available on the iPhone version of OS X, and neither are some newer features like garbage collection, which would not run well on low-powered devices like the iPhone. You can expect future versions of desktop and iPhone OS X to converge. Although it is unlikely that they will ever share exactly the same APIs, there is an increasingly large common subset that works on both.

Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)

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