[pjmlp]

No, not really.

You will notice that everyone that is replying that you can, also mentions that actually you have to make use from the Objective-C runtime from C.

So for all pratical purposes you will be writing an Objective-C application, manually writing the code that the Objective-C compiler used to generate when it was originally designed as a macro pre-processor generating C code at StepStone.

The way iOS is designed the bottom layer for userspace applications is Objective-C, not pure C UNIX style, and using the C APIs from the Objective-C runtime hardly changes that, you will be calling into the Objective-C runtime one way or the other.