There is no out of the box support provided by Apple to add animated GIF’s to your iOS applications. There are many convoluted solutions available on the interwebs. After trying a few, I have come to rely on the super-easy to integrate solution by Flipboard Inc called FLAnimatedImage. Their library makes it a piece of cake to add animated GIF’s to your iOS applications.
This project is an end-to-end implementation in Xcode 5 using Storyboards.
Flipboard's FLAnimatedImage: