I'm trying to create an effect whereby a photo is blurry at the top, but not at the bottom, and the blurriness 'fades off' gradually. I achieved this with the code below, which worked fine in iOS9, but does not in iOS10.
I'm aware of a known bug, as described in this question, that prevents a layer having a mask and a blur on the same layer.
The difference between my question and the one linked, is I'm not interested in using a CAShapeLayer as my mask, but rather a CAGradientLayer. I've tried fiddling with adding views/masks/layers in different orders, but am not having much luck.
var visualEffectView = UIVisualEffectView(effect: UIBlurEffect(style: .light))
visualEffectView.frame = CGRect(x: 0.0, y:0.0, width: photo.bounds.width, height: photo.bounds.height)
photo.addSubview(visualEffectView)
let maskStartColour = UIColor(red: 0.0, green: 0.0, blue: 0.0, alpha: 1.0)
let maskEndColour = UIColor(red: 0.0, green: 0.0, blue: 0.0, alpha: 0.0)
let gradient = CAGradientLayer()
gradient.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: visualEffectView.bounds.width, height: visualEffectView.bounds.height)
let colors: [AnyObject] = [maskStartColour.cgColor, maskEndColour.cgColor]
gradient.colors = colors
gradient.startPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.0, y: 0.0)
gradient.endPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.0, y: 1.0)
visualEffectView.layer.mask = gradient