[einsteinx2]

Finally!! I never liked CocoaPods due to how it “takes over” your Xcode project. I used to prefer Carthage, then just git submodules, then SPM. In my last job I oversaw SDK development and CocoaPods was the bain of my existence. Constant CDN problems causing release delays, annoying extra file in Ruby to maintain, different behavior than our other releases due to how CocoaPods builds projects, etc. SPM was as simple as pushing a git tag and maintaining a simple Swift file, while pushing to CocoaPods was rolling the dice how many times I’d get an error message. Good riddance!

[secretsatan]

It was a product of it’s time, it highlighted an issue that apple never really addressed, i have much more confidence in the future of SPM because at least it seems to be moving in tandem with Swift

[monocularvision]

I agree entirely. I feel like CocoaPods should have done this shortly after iOS 8 was released when dynamic frameworks were added. It was a terrible solution to a problem that way outlived its usefulness and because of that has absolutely polluted the ecosystem.

[jbverschoor]

Finally someone sane.

[ardit33]

lol... you really don't like it, do you. I used it for a couple of my projects, and I kinda agree with you. I didn't like it at all how it took over projects (you have to use a workspace).

For my small personal projects, eventually I ended up into reverting to just downloading the dependencies myself into a lib folder. A bit more work upfront, but simpler builds and you know what's going into your project.

I think it had its use and time, and it is good for the maintainers to mark it deprecated and time to move on.

[einsteinx2]

Haha I really don’t, but I do get why others liked it, it was just never for me. I also forgot the intermediate step I took between git submodules and SPM where I did exactly what you did with manually adding deps to the project. Git submodules is it’s own frustrating hell lol…

More recently though the lack of maintenance of the CDN causing lots of problems not only publishing but even just pod installs failing was really frustrating, and as an SDK/framework maintainer just having to support multiple package managers was a huge pain in the ass. Especially with React Native requiring CocoaPods and having its own weird problems we have to solve in the pod file.

But yeah glad to see it being sunset now that there’s an officially sanctioned package manager. I know some people will complain that SPM isn’t as full featured as CocoaPods but I’ve found it gets the job done and the fact it’s both run off a simple Swift file and git tags and has official support from Apple is great. Kind of reminds me of Carthage for the modern age, in a good way.