If you avoid transparent view backgrounds (just give labels a grey background if your cell has a grey background) and disk reads then you can make fast UITableViewCells without having to resort to drawRect. You should also avoid things like layer.cornerRadius and allocating lots of objects (such as NSNumberFormatters) in cellForRowAtIndexPath.
That said, if you get frame skips after all that then overriding drawRect for the content view is a great way to speed it up. You have to be careful to keep your app accessible though, since the view has no labels for the screen reader to read. And orientation changes can look awkward.
That said, if you get frame skips after all that then overriding drawRect for the content view is a great way to speed it up. You have to be careful to keep your app accessible though, since the view has no labels for the screen reader to read. And orientation changes can look awkward.