Internally the runloop/application setup all the global & per thread pointers that makes things work under the hood. They also allocate a base OBAutoreleasePool for you and deal with signalling, etc. So those 3 steps: allocating an OBApplication, running it and freeing as the last thing you release are mandatory.

Another thing that'll be fixed in Flow: in the project I've linked to, the DEBUG target links -lob_debug.framework and -lmui_debug.framework - these perform a lot of additional checks and will also tell you which objects you've leaked at the time of OBApplication's dealloc.

There's no NSLog equivalent - use kprintf.