Sometimes you just can't achieve something with public APIs. Especially on Apple OSes, they love making genuinely useful APIs private for no good reason while heavily using them in their own apps.

Of course, if you use a private API, you're on your own if your app breaks because of it. I myself have done my fair share of using private APIs on Android. Ideally, you should test your app on beta versions of every upcoming major OS release to make sure it doesn't break. Even more ideally, there's a public equivalent starting with some OS version and you only use the private one until that version, then nothing will ever break.