Grid view in iOS

You can still use the UITableView for this and you would not need to subclass it. Like you said all you have to do is create your own custom cell which it is not complicated. Not messy at all :)

For iOS 6 and above I recommend UICollectionView and PSTCollectionView.

The goal is to use PSTCollectionView on iOS 4/5 as a fallback and switch to UICollectionView on iOS6. We even use certain runtime tricks to create UICollectionView at runtime for older versions of iOS. Ideally, you just link the files and everything works on older systems.

In the year 2010 I recommended AQGridView

I'm aware this is very old but I was searching for answer to this and tested several solutions. I found GMGridView was one of the best, least buggy solutions. Check it out at https://github.com/gmoledina/GMGridView.