Adding ARC support to third-party framework

In principle, nothing stops you using library built with ARC with your own code that uses manual memory ref-counting (MMR). If you properly handle the ownership of objects used by the SDK, there should be no leaks (apart from bugs in the SDK!).

It's worth putting some effort into trying to work out why the leaks are happening. For example, if you create an object in an SDK class using alloc/init, it's returned with a +1 ownership count, and your code must release it when your reference goes out of scope. In other words, it should make no difference to your code whether the SDK uses ARC or not.

You can also look at the old transition guide:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/ObjectiveC/RN-TransitioningToARC/Introduction/Introduction.html

for guidance on specific issues, if you're being affected by an odd case.

Finally, you can use the Allocations tool in Instruments to capture and examine the allocation history of leaked objects, to try to find out where unmatched retains are coming from. (You can try the memory graph debugger in Xcode, but it has a reputation for being unreliable.)

Thanks for responding. Could you clarify something for me? I was under the impression that because the SDK was created without ARC, it would be missing release calls in its internal methods. Then, because I'm using a project that doesn't have ARC, those release calls never get injected and any init/copy calls within the sdk could become memory leaks.