iOS: How to know if viewDidLoad got called?

Use isViewLoaded. Other than that it does exactly what you want, there's not that much to say about it. The documentation is as simple as:

Calling this method reports whether the view is loaded. Unlike the view property, it does not attempt to load the view if it is not already in memory.

Perhaps you should init your UIView in viewDidLoad, and then change it in whichever way you need to inside viewWillLayoutSubviews.

Here's the pedantic answer to this question. If you want to know when viewDidLoad has been triggered, you have to implement viewDidLoad in your view controller

- (void)viewDidLoad{    [super viewDidLoad];    viewDidLoadCalled = YES; // Not actually the best way to do this...    // Set up more view properties}

But as Tommy says, you actually need to use isViewLoaded. This gets around the problem of doing a check like

if (!self.view) {    // do something}

which inadvertently loads the view by virtue of asking about it.

Be aware that by the time viewWillAppear: is called, the view will always have loaded. Also, on older (pre-iOS 6 I think) releases, the view can unload and be reloaded many times over a view controller's lifetime. Refer to the very nice Big Nerd Ranch view lifecycle diagram for the old behavior. It's almost the same in iOS 6+, except that the view doesn't unload under low memory conditions and viewDidUnload doesn't get called: