[austinl]

Since people are discussing Auto Layout alternatives, I'd recommend AsyncDisplayKit (http://asyncdisplaykit.org/) – although it's a bit more advanced. Layout mimics CSS and Flexbox. It was originally built by Facebook and very actively maintained.

You also get a number of other advantages, like moving UI operations off of the main thread (which is often a pain point in iOS apps shooting for 60fps).

[kitsunesoba]

AsyncDisplayKit is cool stuff, but I really wish it were possible to yank its layout and “doesn’t do layout on the main thread” parts and apply them to vanilla UIKit. It’s frustrating to run into the inevitable unsupported use cases, bugs, etc with alternative UI systems. UIKit has its quirks but it’s mature enough that coming up with a use case that it can’t serve in on way or another is difficult. It’ll be years before alternatives can achieve that.

[cellularmitosis]

Doing asynch UI "by hand" might be easier than you think. Here's a table view example: https://github.com/pepaslabs/GlitchyTable