ARC is fine as long as you don’t do fancy stuff. Luckily you can disable ARC on a per file basis so that most of your code can benefit from ARC and the more complex stuff can be manually handled by you.

To disable ARC for a file (or a group) select your project in Xcode 4, go to the “build phases” tab and select the files you want to disable ARC for. Add then the -fno-objc-arc compiler flag to these files.

ARC will be now disabled for the chosen files and you can retain/(auto)release as you desire