Sometimes, it's just worth it to accept the risk and do UIKit operations on a background thread; you just have to manage those risks. This category prints to the log any time you accidentally mess with setAnimationsEnabled: from a background thread and lets you set a breakpoint at SEViewAlertForUnsafeBackgroundCalls to inspect the call stack. Yo…

UIView+BadBackgroundBehavior.m

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
#import <objc/runtime.h>

#ifdef DEBUG

void SEViewAlertForUnsafeBackgroundCalls() {
    NSLog(@"----------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
    NSLog(@" ");
    NSLog(@"Background call to setAnimationsEnabled: detected. This method is not thread safe.");
    NSLog(@"Set a breakpoint at SEUIViewDidSetAnimationsOffMainThread to inspect this call.");
    NSLog(@" ");
    NSLog(@"----------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
}

@implementation UIView (BadBackgroundBehavior)

+ (void)load
{
    method_exchangeImplementations(class_getInstanceMethod(object_getClass(self), @selector(setAnimationsEnabled:)),
                                   class_getInstanceMethod(object_getClass(self), @selector(SE_setAnimationsEnabled:)));
}

+ (void)SE_setAnimationsEnabled:(BOOL)enabled
{
    if (![NSThread isMainThread]) {
        SEViewAlertForUnsafeBackgroundCalls();
    }
    [self SE_setAnimationsEnabled:enabled];
}

@end

#endif

This works for me

+ (void)load {
    method_exchangeImplementations(class_getClassMethod([self class], @selector(setAnimationsEnabled:)),
                                   class_getClassMethod([self class], @selector(xx_setAnimationsEnabled:)));
}