What's the difference between unwind segues and popping to view controllers?

Question

The app I'm working on will need to implement a workflow to allow users to enter information in a form. Instead of using a scroll view, I'm planning to break it up into a bunch of separate view controllers, which will be managed by a navigation controller. I started by laying out all the form fragments in a storyboard, and began connecting all the push and unwind segues for the different parts of the form.

My question is, how is using all these push and unwind segues any better than simply using the pushViewController and popToViewController methods of my navigation controller, and skipping the storyboard altogether? Is there any difference in terms of memory management or performance? Wouldn't simply using push and pop be better practice in terms of design and maintainability? I can't find anything in the docs that addresses this.

Answer 1

There's basically no difference in terms of what they do. The one thing that's good about using unwinds, is that you can pass data back to the controller you're unwinding to. If you use the pop methods, then you have to create a delegate protocol to do this. But a lot of this is subjective. You can use which ever is more comfortable for you. I like using the storyboard because it makes it easy to see the relationships between the controllers. Using storyboards can be a problem (so I've heard anyway) when you are working in a large team, so that's another consideration.