Why is addSubview: not retaining the view?

Question

I\'m adding two subviews, which are stored by properties, to my view. When adding the subviews to my view the subViews are seemingly deallocated after my setup

Answer 1

Weak shouldn't be used unless in cases where a parent-child retain cycle is formed (the parent keeps a reference to the child, the child keeps a reference to the parent, so neither is dealloc'd). Strong is the ARC equivalent of retain (now invalid under ARC), and keeps a nice stable pointer to the object for a much longer period of time than a weak reference, hence addSubview actually works instead of giving you some kind of error.

Why is the addSubview: and insertSubview: not retaining the subviews?

Have you ever tried to call retain on a nil object? Yep, still nil. Your weak reference isn't keeping the UIView object around long enough to successfully 'call retain' on the object.