How to use NSJSONSerialization

Your code seems fine except the result is an NSArray, not an NSDictionary, here is an example:

The first two lines just creates a data object with the JSON, the same as you would get reading it from the net.

NSString *jsonString = @"[{\"id\": \"1\", \"name\":\"Aaa\"}, {\"id\": \"2\", \"name\":\"Bbb\"}]";
NSData *jsonData = [jsonString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

NSError *e;
NSMutableArray *jsonList = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:jsonData options:NSJSONReadingMutableContainers error:&e];
NSLog(@"jsonList: %@", jsonList);

NSLog contents (a list od dictionaries):

jsonList: (
           {
               id = 1;
               name = Aaa;
           },
           {
               id = 2;
               name = Bbb;
           }
           )