Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 15, 2026

AVFoundation

AVFoundation is a multimedia framework with APIs in Objective-C and Swift, which provides high-level services for working with time-based audiovisual media on Apple Darwin-based operating systems: iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It was first introduced in iOS 4 and has seen significant changes in iOS 5 and iOS 6. Starting with Mac OS X Lion, it is now the default media framework for the macOS platform.

Last revised
Jun 15, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
206 w
Citations
3
Source

AVFoundation is a multimedia framework with APIs in Objective-C and Swift, which provides high-level services for working with time-based audiovisual media on Apple Darwin-based operating systems: iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.1 It was first introduced in iOS 423 and has seen significant changes in iOS 5 and iOS 6. Starting with Mac OS X Lion, it is now the default media framework for the macOS platform.

AVKit

As a component of AVFoundation, AVKit is an API that comes with OS X Mavericks 10.9+ and can be used with Xcode 5.0+ for developing media player software for Mac.

The AVKit software framework is replacing QTKit which was deprecated in OS X Mavericks, and was discontinued with the release of macOS Catalina.

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "AV Foundation". Apple Inc. Retrieved 1 December 2014.
  2. Exploring AV Foundation Archived 2017-06-30 at the Wayback Machine - WWDC 2011
  3. Framework AVFoundation - API Reference Archived 2017-04-20 at the Wayback Machine developer.apple.com
External links