I understand it. The problem is that not only is it a fundamentally flawed concept but the tools are inadequate. Moving a control by as much as one pixel in IB can completely scramble your constraints, including deleting user constraints attached to properties.
The API is ridiculously verbose and the visual language is underpowered and cryptic. It's sad but going back to manual frame calculations actually saved me a lot of time.
I think a lot of iOS devs don't realize how crap it is because they haven't taken the time to learn how other platforms solve these problems in a much more logical & developer friendly way.
The API, on the other hand, is very nice. Although constraints can be slightly verbose, they are ages better than having to manually re-layout views after every single change of the superview's bounds. Spring and struts are nice, but cannot replace all of the CGGeometry math which is equally as, if not more, verbose than adding constraints. Autolayout is add-and-forget. The only downside is that it is iOS6+ only.
Have you done any Android dev? I find the various layout containers there far, far more intuitive and explicit and semantically clear. Let's face it, 95% of UI is nested grid layouts. Plus, having instant visual feedback for layout tweaks is a big time saver.
The API is ridiculously verbose and the visual language is underpowered and cryptic. It's sad but going back to manual frame calculations actually saved me a lot of time.
I think a lot of iOS devs don't realize how crap it is because they haven't taken the time to learn how other platforms solve these problems in a much more logical & developer friendly way.