Such a big piece of history and a de facto standard for managing dependencies for Apple platforms for years.
Big "thank you" to all maintainers for your great job! And respect that you recognise moment when ecosystem changed and have courage to deprecate library instead of maintaining it forever - to leave place for migrating to new, superior solutions
gregoriol · 1h ago
This is really sad, because the replacement, Swift Package Manager, is really crap: it lacks some useful features (an "outdated" command, meaningful commandline output, ...), is buggy as hell in xcode (most of the time xcode just crashes when you add/removed a dependency, error messages while getting a repository are not understandable and even often not visible entirely, many repositories have some old Package.swift that current developer tools won't read, ...), and worst of all, it stores the full repositories of all the dependencies with their full history on your machine and downloads them every time when you do CI properly, which often means GBs of data.
rTX5CMRXIfFG · 39m ago
I don’t know, I’ve never had those problems and my codebases reach 600k+ LOC. I’ve certainly had plenty of errors to deal with Cocoapods and obsolete frameworks though, though those projects also tend to use pretty much every third-party lib that gets attention on Medium.
Modularizing an Xcode project with local Swift packages has been the best productivity gain in my experience. Doing something similar with Cocoapods is a headache.
meisel · 13m ago
Yeah, I’ve hit many pain points over the years with SwiftPM. Its restrictions on compiler flags is also problematic.
wahnfrieden · 1h ago
Tuist
richrichardsson · 51m ago
In spite of search engines being a thing, this comment could have done with a bit more information. I assume you're talking about this: https://docs.tuist.dev/en/
wahnfrieden · 26m ago
Yes
myko · 19m ago
I will never start another Apple platform application without Tuist. If I start work on one I will do my best to get buy-in to switch.
seanalltogether · 1h ago
Apple has always made it painful to step too far off the path with their tooling and frameworks and cocoapods was not immune to that pain. I'm grateful of what they made and the pressure they put on Apple to make things better, but I was very happy to remove yet another 3rd party dependency from our toolchain the moment we were able to.
Flutter has moved to Swift Package Manager, it’s just not enabled by default iirc
mrbombastic · 1h ago
It does, in recent react native versions they show a deprecation warning when running “pod install” directly which is probably a signal they are working on moving to other package managers, but not aware of what the plan is.
oulipo2 · 1h ago
Capacitor too, for hybrid mobile apps
aravindputrevu · 1h ago
Isnt this a old news? I'm thinking of Swift Package manager for all the stuff new.
gregoriol · 1h ago
From my experience, about 20-30% of the packages are not working with swiftpm, either because they don't have a Package.swift file, or because it is not compatible with up-to-date developer tools. On many projects, I had to fork a few repositories just to add or fix the swiftpm integration... while their Pod integration has always been working well.
rTX5CMRXIfFG · 38m ago
That is the cost of using third party libraries, hardly the fault of either SPM or Cocoapods.
sturza · 1h ago
End of an era.
deadbabe · 1h ago
Was it a good era?
Manfred · 49m ago
You have to understand where we came from. Development for iOS and macOS (then MacOS) meant you had to pluck source files from random places on the internet and weave them into your Xcode build. Xcode and xcodebuild didn't really shine in the department of extensibility.
Eloy designed CocoaPods to be the absolute minimum we needed to deal with dependencies for the projects we were working on. So that meant:
* Rely on GitHub for hosting so nobody would get bankrupted running the repo, with the option to switch over to self-hosted in case that ever became necessary.
* Use Git and existing project tools on GitHub to deal with external contributions for pods.
* Use Ruby for scripting because that was what people used most at that time.
* Use Ruby for pod definitions for flexibility and reduced development time (ie. so CocoaPods didn't need a parser).
For a long time this was a one-person effort.
All of those decision obviously have downsides, even more obvious now you have to power of hindsight given years of incremental improvements on speed and security of dependency managers.
I think Eloy did a great job in general and the popularity gained speaks for itself.
weego · 1h ago
No pods are an absolute misery and at best a concrete example of what not to do. So at least there's that.
tomashubelbauer · 44m ago
As a very occasional iOS developer, I never enjoyed it. I preferred Carthage and jumped over SPM the moment it became available. I understand SPM didn't or even still doesn't meet the needs of many professional iOS developers, but for my hobby needs, it was the simplest and easiest to use.
jurip · 22m ago
I preferred Carthage in theory, but every time I tried using it in anger I hit enormous stumbling blocks with projects not actually living up to its exacting standards, then spent hours faffing about before going back to CocoaPods.
I'm happy to see the back of CocoaPods, but it kickstarted the library package ecosystem on the Apple platforms, where there was nothing like it before.
Cthulhu_ · 1h ago
Probably not, but all modern-day package managers owe a debt to Cocoapods for the things it did right and the things that could have been better.
swiftcoder · 46m ago
It may not have been great, but it was certainly better than the likely alternative (no package management at all for iOS development).
rvz · 12m ago
Absolutely No.
gregoriol · 1h ago
Better than the "current" future
Copenjin · 47m ago
No.
frizlab · 1h ago
No.
bingemaker · 1h ago
Thoroughly enjoyed while it lasted! Thank you maintainers.
tonyhart7 · 55m ago
good news, react native and flutter piggyback on external deps need to stop
no idea if google will nix flutter tomorrow or not but it is extremely well run and seems to stay ahead of things pretty well, even though i'd rather write Swift than Dart (or Kotlin, for that matter)
forgingahead · 50m ago
Sad, truly an end of an era. Big thanks to all maintainers!
Big "thank you" to all maintainers for your great job! And respect that you recognise moment when ecosystem changed and have courage to deprecate library instead of maintaining it forever - to leave place for migrating to new, superior solutions
Modularizing an Xcode project with local Swift packages has been the best productivity gain in my experience. Doing something similar with Cocoapods is a headache.
https://blog.cocoapods.org/CocoaPods-Support-Plans/
The timeline in the original article seems very reasonable to me. They go out of their way to avoid breakages.
Eloy designed CocoaPods to be the absolute minimum we needed to deal with dependencies for the projects we were working on. So that meant:
* Rely on GitHub for hosting so nobody would get bankrupted running the repo, with the option to switch over to self-hosted in case that ever became necessary. * Use Git and existing project tools on GitHub to deal with external contributions for pods. * Use Ruby for scripting because that was what people used most at that time. * Use Ruby for pod definitions for flexibility and reduced development time (ie. so CocoaPods didn't need a parser).
For a long time this was a one-person effort.
All of those decision obviously have downsides, even more obvious now you have to power of hindsight given years of incremental improvements on speed and security of dependency managers.
I think Eloy did a great job in general and the popularity gained speaks for itself.
I'm happy to see the back of CocoaPods, but it kickstarted the library package ecosystem on the Apple platforms, where there was nothing like it before.
https://docs.flutter.dev/packages-and-plugins/swift-package-...
no idea if google will nix flutter tomorrow or not but it is extremely well run and seems to stay ahead of things pretty well, even though i'd rather write Swift than Dart (or Kotlin, for that matter)