If you have an open source library that requires Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), you may have issues with your users trying to build it without ARC turned on. Luckily, it’s pretty simple to enforce ARC. Here’s an example, which I submitted to AFNetworking: #if !__has_feature(objc_arc) #error AFNetworking must be built with ARC. // You can turn on ARC for only AFNetworking files by adding -fobj