Render advanced 3D graphics and perform data-parallel computations. Get fine-grained access to the GPU while minimizing CPU overhead. The Metal Framework provides extremely low-overhead access to the GPU, enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal moves all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. It provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure that your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency. Graphics, compute, and blit commands can be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

Secure the data your app manages. Protect information and control access to your app.

AdMob has been rebuilt, leveraging the best of Google's ad platforms. It's designed for app developers, with an intuitive UI to help you start earning from your app quickly, create campaigns in minutes to acquire new users, and gain insights into your app's performance.

The Ad Support framework provides apps with access to an identifier that can be used only for serving advertisements, as well as a flag which indicates whether a user has limited ad tracking. Accessing the advertising identifier requires apps to read and honor the opt-out flag.

The Audio Toolbox framework provides interfaces for recording, playback, and stream parsing. In iOS, the framework provides additional interfaces for managing audio sessions.

The AV Foundation framework provides an Objective-C interface for managing and playing audio-visual media in iOS and OS X applications.

Core Audio is the digital audio infrastructure of iOS and OS X. It includes a set of software frameworks designed to handle the audio needs in your applications. Read this chapter to learn what you can do with Core Audio.

Core Foundation is a framework that provides fundamental software services useful to application services, application environments, and to applications themselves. Core Foundation also provides abstractions for common data types, facilitates internationalization with Unicode string storage, and offers a suite of utilities such as plug-in support, XML property lists, URL resource access, and preferences.