Note that the public style guides aren't always a 1:1 match with the internal ones, usually for legacy reasons or to be more consistent with other internal lang

Note that the public style guides aren't always a 1:1 match with the internal ones, usually for legacy reasons or to be more consistent with other internal languages. I don't see anything offhand in the internal ObjC guide about alphabetical order for ivars, so it's possible the OP misunderstood the "dealloc in declaration order" rule. It's also possible his specific project had a convention of sorting them alphabetically.