It may be tempting to go the middleware route, but whenever I worked with middleware I had completely unrelated issues to the underlying framework which either complicated matters, or made it impossible to fix specific bugs. Then there’s the issue that Apple has a pretty aggressive release schedule. For a middleware maintainer it takes pretty long (compared to Apple’s native solutions) to adapt to these changes (I’m thinking about things like the notch on the iPhone X and safe areas). Apple’s secrecy about their upcoming release schedules doesn’t help, but it’s just how things are.

And just a minor nitpick, Apple’s development environment is called Xcode, where just the X is written uppercase.