The new UISplitViewController class and delegate methods in iOS 8 is interesting, and caused me a lot of head scratching last week. The problem Brent Simmons describes here, where after rotating the device from regular to compact size class and back again iOS uses the topmost master view controller as the new detail view, instead of the previous detail view, is roughly the same issue I had.

As far as I can tell so far, I think the following approach solves the issue. Note that I don’t think I have the same set up as Brent - I have a navigation stack in each of the master and detail sides - but I think the general approach is sound, based on advice from Apple in the the “Building Adaptive Apps with UIKit” session from this year’s WWDC, and the “AdaptivePhotos” sample app code they provide.

My UISplitViewController delegate looks like this:

• In the ‘collapse’ method, which is called when the device rotates to portrait, we disregard the detail view controller and use the master view controller if the detail view has no content
• In the ‘merge’ method, we look to see if there’s a navigation controller which is displaying a NoteViewController (this controller is currently only used as a detail view, exclusively, so it’s a safe bet). If it exists, we use it - otherwise we retrieve the ‘stock’ note view controller stack from the storyboard and use that.

This approach seems to have worked well so far. The majority of issues I’ve found have been on the iPhone 6 Plus, which combines the single hierarchy approach of the smaller form factor devices in regular mode, with the side-by-side dual view approach or the larger form factors in compact mode - this hybrid strategy seems to require more direction on our part, whereas elsewhere iOS tends to guess right on its own.

A final note - having to manually ensure the back button exists and is configured on the detail view controller is a bit icky, but I needed to do this to avoid a crash. I’d love to hear from anyone with more elegant ways to handle this.