While working with the Facebook iOS SDK was a horrible experience, I don't get where this is coming from:
"Apple pushes new iOS releases...breaking software written relatively recently"
Can this really be considered true? I can't remember anything deprecated that didn't still function in iOS, with the exception of the UDID and mac address APIs which were deprecated for privacy reasons (and developers have had ages to move away from UDID). iOS 3 era code I download from Github still runs fine. At worst, this summer Apple required apps to support the iPhone 5 format, but that's a pretty easy upgrade to support, and a major user facing one.
Admittedly, it's mostly lots of little things over the course of iOS updates, small changes in the behavior of specific SDK packages rather than full-bore failures. I may have overstated that point and it certainly pales in comparison to FB. Still, you get the gist right?
Like ibogost said, it seems to be more of the little things with Apple. One random example that affected me (somewhere around iOS 5) was modal views not being able to pop themselves anymore via parent (ie [self.parentviewcontroller popViewControllerAnimated]), they have to instead call that method on themselves.
Nothing terrible, but back on topic, I too dislike touching 3rd-party stuff, FB or Twitter...
Do you mean dismissViewControllerAnimated? According to the docs, calling it on self should still work:
The presenting view controller is responsible for dismissing the view
controller it presented. If you call this method on the presented view
controller itself, it automatically forwards the message to the
presenting view controller.
"Apple pushes new iOS releases...breaking software written relatively recently"
Can this really be considered true? I can't remember anything deprecated that didn't still function in iOS, with the exception of the UDID and mac address APIs which were deprecated for privacy reasons (and developers have had ages to move away from UDID). iOS 3 era code I download from Github still runs fine. At worst, this summer Apple required apps to support the iPhone 5 format, but that's a pretty easy upgrade to support, and a major user facing one.