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.

This document describes the Accelerate framework, which contains C APIs for vector and matrix math, digital signal processing, large number handling, and image processing.

The Accounts framework provides access to user accounts stored in the Accounts database. An account stores the login credentials of a particular service, such as Twitter, that can be used as authentication for the service. By implementing the Accounts framework into your app, you do not need to be responsible for storing account logins yourself. Instead, the user can grant access for your app to use their account login credentials, bypassing the need to type their username and password. If no account for a particular service exists in the user’s Accounts database, you can let them create and save an account from within your app.

The Address Book framework provides access to a centralized contacts database, called the Address Book database, that stores a user’s contacts. Applications such as Mail and Messages use this database to present information about known and unknown persons.

In iOS and OS X, the Photos framework (formerly known as Assets Library framework) provides classes that support building photo editing extensions for the Photos app. In iOS, the Photos framework also provides direct access to the photo and video assets managed by the Photos app, including the iCloud Photo Library. Use this framework to retrieve assets for display and playback, edit their image or video content, or work with collections of assets such as albums, moments, and iCloud Shared Albums.

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.

Create view-level services for media playback, complete with user controls, chapter navigation, and support for subtitles and closed captioning.

The AWS Mobile SDK helps you build high quality mobile apps quickly and easily. It provides easy access to a range of AWS services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Mobile Analytics, Amazon Machine Learning, Elastic Load balancing, Auto Scaling and more. The AWS Mobile SDK includes libraries, code samples, and documentation for iOS, Android, Fire OS, and Unity so you can build apps that deliver great experiences across devices and platforms.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and scale past trillions of objects worldwide. Customers use S3 as primary storage for cloud-native applications; as a bulk repository, or "data lake," for analytics; as a target for backup & recovery and disaster recovery; and with serverless computing. It's simple to move large volumes of data into or out of Amazon S3 with Amazon's cloud data migration options. Once data is stored in S3, it can be automatically tiered into lower cost, longer-term cloud storage classes like S3 Standard - Infrequent Access and Amazon Glacier for archiving.