I am trying to display a JPEG image as it downloads, using part of the data, similiar to many web browsers do, or the facebook app.
there is a low-quality version of the
I believe this is what you are looking for:
https://github.com/contentful-labs/Concorde
A framework for downloading and decoding progressive JPEGs on iOS and OS X, that uses libjpeg-turbo as underlying JPEG implementation.