the behavior of the UICollectionViewFlowLayout is not defined, because the cell width is greater than collectionView width

This happens when your collection view resizes to something less wide (go from landscape to portrait mode, for example), and the cell becomes too large to fit.

Why is the cell becoming too large, as the collection view flow layout should be called and return a suitable size ?

collectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView, layout collectionViewLayout: UICollectionViewLayout, sizeForItemAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath)

Update to include Swift 4

@objc override func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, cellForItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UICollectionViewCell
{  ...  }

This is because this function is not called, or at least not straight away.

What happens is that your collection view flow layout subclass does not override the shouldInvalidateLayoutForBoundsChange function, which returns false by default.

When this method returns false, the collection view first tries to go with the current cell size, detects a problem (which logs the warning) and then calls the flow layout to resize the cell.

This means 2 things :

1 - The warning in itself is not harmful

2 - You can get rid of it by simply overriding the shouldInvalidateLayoutForBoundsChange function to return true. In that case, the flow layout will always be called when the collection view bounds change.

select collectionview in storyboard go to size inspector change estimate size to none

I've also seen this occur when we set the estimatedItemSize to automaticSize and the computed size of the cells is less than 50x50 (Note: This answer was valid at the time of iOS 12. Maybe later versions have it fixed).

i.e. if you are declaring support for self-sizing cells by setting the estimated item size to the automaticSize constant:

flowLayout.estimatedItemSize = UICollectionViewFlowLayout.automaticSize

and your cells are actually smaller than 50x50 points, then UIKit prints out these warnings. FWIW, the cells are eventually sized appropriately and the warnings seem to be harmless.

One fix workaround is to replace the constant with a 1x1 estimated item size:

flowLayout.estimatedItemSize = CGSize(width: 1, height: 1)

This does not impact the self-sizing support, because as the documentation for estimatedItemSize mentions:

Setting it to any other value causes the collection view to query each cell for its actual size using the cell’s preferredLayoutAttributesFitting(_:) method.

However, it might/might-not have performance implications.