iOS Singletons and Memory Management

Question

I\'m certain that I\'m missing some fundamental understanding of iOS memory management and, despite lots of reading and searching, I\'m still not getting it.

I use a sin

Answer 1

Don't use singletons. Your current problem is caused by a simple memory management misconception, but the singleton pattern will only give you more headache in the long run.

Answer 2

Your problem is:

I get and set their values in methods in the singleton like this:

myString = @"value";

When you assign directly to the iVar, instead of using the property syntax (self.myString = @"value"), you are bypassing the synthesized setter method, which means that the retain never happens.

Properties aren't magic. They're just a bit of syntactic sugar for the "." access, and the ability to have synthesized getter/setter methods to save you the tedium of writing your own.

self.myString = @"value";

is just shorthand for

[self setMyString:@"value"];

The synthesized setMyString method will do something like:

if (myString != newValue) {
    [myString release];
    myString = [newValue retain];
}

(assuming retain option on the @synthesize)