Idk if I agree that objective-c is simpler to learn. I have been working as a full-time ios developer for almost 2 years now and I still have to consult fuckingblocksyntax.com on a weekly basis. And fully understanding objective-c's "message passing" idea is hard because it's so radically different from other languages.
And sure you can whip together a simple app using all the documentation and tutorials out there for objective-c. But objective-c has a lot of gotchas that make it easy to do bad things as you start to build a larger app. Like retaining self implicitly because of an ivar in a block... Can't tell you how many times that is bitten us.
That being said, have you tried to use Swift with the core foundation framework? Yikes. I spent hours yesterday trying to understand how to simply pass a pointer to a function. The type was something like CMutablePointer<Unmanaged<SecKey>?>. Hopefully it'll get easier as the documentation improves though :)