How to deprecate a method in Objective-C

__attribute__((deprecated)) is the gcc way (also supported in clang) of marking a function / method as deprecated. When one is marked as “deprecated”, a warning will be produced whenever anyone calls it.

The syntax for normal functions would be

__attribute__((deprecated))
void f(...) {
  ...
}

// gcc 4.5+ / clang
__attribute__((deprecated("g has been deprecated please use g2 instead")))
void g(...) {
  ...
}

and that of Objective-C methods would be

@interface MyClass : NSObject { ... }
-(void)f:(id)x __attribute__((deprecated));
...
@end

You can also mark the whole class as deprecated with

__attribute__((deprecated))
@interface DeprecatedClass : NSObject { ... }
...
@end

Apple also provides the <AvailabilityMacros.h> header which provides the DEPRECATED_ATTRIBUTE and DEPRECATED_MSG_ATTRIBUTE(msg) macros that expand to the above attributes, or nothing if the compiler doesn’t support attributes. Note that this header doesn’t exist outside of OS X / iOS.

Side note, if you are using Swift you use the @available attribute to deprecate an item, e.g.

@available(*, deprecated=2.0, message="no longer needed")
func f() {
    ...
}