I have a custom CALayer - UIProgressLayer - for simulating a progress bar. There is a dispatched GC timer involved to animate its intermediate state. So thats the layer I'm talking about here, although i don't think the problem is restricted to this particular subclass because a CALayer with only the -release and -dealloc overridden produces the same outcome.

The problem is when i send this layer, for instance, a

theLayer.opacity = 0.5f

a -release message is sent to the layer, thus deallocating my layer. Why is this happening? Has it something to do with how the whole CA system works? But it still has to obey the object ownership rules right?

I was thinking maybe it creates a copy of that layer for the fading, but that's not the case.