Thank you for the explanation - this is good to know. The funny thing is that I was merely future-proofing for potentially using CloudKit, which (I believe) requires this to be an optional. I'm not passionate about it, typically I would be checking to see whether it is either nil or empty for control flow anyways - the only real inconvenience is that it needs to be an optional at all, but I see there are reasons for this when it comes to CloudKit.