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If a property is synthesized, then the associated instance variable is the instance variable which is named, possibly implicitly, by the @synthesize declaration. If the associated instance variable already exists, then its ownership qualification must equal the ownership of the property; otherwise, the instance variable is created with that ownership qualification.

In 1988, NeXT licensed Objective-C from StepStone (the owner of the Objective-C trademark) and extended the GCC compiler to support Objective-C, and developed the AppKit and Foundation Kit libraries on which the NeXTstep user interface and interface builder were based. While the NeXT workstations failed to make a great impact in the marketplace, the tools were widely lauded in the industry. This led NeXT to drop hardware production and focus on software tools, selling NeXTstep (and OpenStep) as a platform for custom programming.

After acquiring NeXT in 1996, Apple Computer used OpenStep in its new operating system, Mac OS X. This included Objective-C and NeXT's Objective-C based developer tool, Project Builder (which had been expanded and is now called Xcode), as well as its interface design tool, Interface Builder. Most of Apple's present-day Cocoa API is based on OpenStep interface objects, and is the most significant Objective-C environment being used for active development.

Object-oriented programming in the Simula style allows multiple inheritances and faster execution by using compile-time binding whenever possible, but it does not support dynamic binding by default. It also forces all methods to have a corresponding implementation unless they are virtual, meaning the method is a placeholder for methods with the same name to be defined in objects derived from the base object.

Smalltalk-style programming allows messages to go unimplemented, with the method resolved to its implementation at runtime. For example, a message may be sent to a collection of objects, to which only some will be expected to respond, without fear of producing runtime errors. Message passing also does not require that an object be defined at compile time. (See the dynamic typing section below for more advantages of dynamic (late) binding.)

During the design of Objective-C, one of the main concerns was the maintainability of large code bases. Experience from the structured programming world had shown that one of the main ways to improve code was to break it down into smaller pieces. Objective-C borrowed and extended the concept of categories from Smalltalk implementations to help with this process