Xcode 5 equivalent of NS_BLOCK_ASSERTIONS in Build Settings
Until Xcode 5, Release builds could be prevented from including NSAssert statements and their variants, using the default Build Setting: OTHER_CFLAGS = "-DNS_BLOCK_ASSERTIONS=1"; This setting can be found in project.pbxproj and is set in Xcode here: (Note that this grab was taken from an Xcode 4 project converted to Xcode 5.) Each target would inherit this setting in the Release build only. Obviously this was a good thing. Rather than crash immediately, the app would possibly struggle on regardless. Whereas for Debug builds, you want to know immediately when an NSAssert fails. However, I am