Apple's block-based APIs aren't intended to replace asynchronous APIs. In fact, Apple's block-based APIs ARE asynchronous APIs. Half of the intent of GCD is to

Apple's block-based APIs aren't intended to replace asynchronous APIs. In fact, Apple's block-based APIs ARE asynchronous APIs. Half of the intent of GCD is to provide a dynamic-thread-queue asynchronous interface to non-blocking I/O APIs via kqueue and friends. GCD aside, there are a ton of reasons not to use synchronous networking, from the resource costs (you're paying for a thread stack per request) to the inability to cancel the synchronous request. One of Apple's engineers (Quinn) wrote up a whole post on the dev forums about why you should not use synchronous networking. It's a "sticky" post at the top of the iOS->Core OS forum: https://devforums.apple.com/thread/9606?tstart=0 https://devforums.apple.com/thread/9606?tstart=0 Lastly, I think your position on spaghetti code is misguided. A block-based wrapper on NSURLConnection will be just as simple as dispatch_async().