UIKit and other frameworks

iOS offers a lot of building blocks in the form of frameworks or "kits". The UIKit framework provides the user interface controls such as buttons, labels and navigation bars. It manages the view controllers and generally takes care of anything else that deals with your app's user interface.

Foundation is the framework that provides many of the basic building blocks for writing Objective-C programs(NS...).

Core Graphics, for drawing basic shapes such as lines, rectangles, gradients and images on the screen.

Core Audio for playing sounds.

CFNetwork for dong networking.

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The complete set of frameworks for iOS is known collectively as Cocoa Touch.