All signs point to yes. Only a few years after I converted from manually reference counting (retain/release) to garbage collection in order to reduce code, it looks like Apple maybe now moving to automatic reference counting (ARC). The links in this blog post provide most of the available information.

Information is relatively scarce at this point and I’d like to see a guide on transitioning from GC to ARC.

Based on what information is out there, I think that this is probably a good way to go. I’ve wanted to move some of my frameworks to iOS, but refrained from doing so simply because I’d have to add all retain/release management back in. Not only would that be a pain, but it’s more code… and more code sucks. This could be a good long term solution. We’ll see.