iOS Development and the Wrong Kind of MVC

When starting out as an iOS Developer, you get to hear a lot about the MVC (Model-View-Controller) Pattern and how it’s the best when developing mobile applications. The MVC Pattern is a good way to think about certain problems when it comes to developing applications with a graphical user interface. It provides you with a way of thinking that lets you split your code into manageable packages, where each package will handle its own problem domain.

What are these packages you’re talking about?

There are three different conceptual packages in MVC that are supposed to handle problems like so:

Model:
The Model package handles what developers call The Business Logic. What The Business Logic is, depends on your particular application, but you can loosely generalize it to mean “the stuff in your application that manages your data and keeps it up to date and accurate”. This means that it’s the Models job to keep track of the position of your game characters, to know how many times you’ve played a song on iTunes, to save your edited photos to a format that you can share on social media… The Model is what makes your application smart.

View:
The View in an MVC application will represent data that is sent from the Model and display it to the user. A View is supposed to be “dumb”, meaning that it should only know how to draw or display the data that it receives but should never make any adjustments to it or even be aware…