Hi, I'd like to open a discussion on how Cordova should approach CocoaPods going forward.
--- About a year ago, the CocoaPods team published a [blog post][1] outlining their future plans, stating that **CocoaPods is now in maintenance mode**. They also clarified what "maintenance" means [here][2]. More recently, approximately a month ago, they released another [update][3] announcing that the CocoaPods trunk will become **read-only**, and the GitHub repository will be archived in the future. Based on the timelines between these two posts, this change might happen around **November 2026**. Given this, it seems clear that **Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM)**—Apple's own package management solution—is intended to be the primary tool for dependency management on iOS moving forward. CocoaPods even said: > "This move effectively took all the wind out of the sails of CocoaPods, slowing active development of the project as competing with Apple on their own turf is rarely a battle worth your volunteer hours." [1] --- With this context in mind, I'd like to suggest that Cordova consider **limiting the introduction of new CocoaPods-specific features**, particularly those that would increase the scope of support for a tool that appears to be on a long-term path toward deprecation. Instead, it may make more sense to **continue maintaining the current CocoaPods implementation**, ensuring that existing functionality remains stable and usable, without expanding our scope on a system that is being phased out. --- **Example: CocoaPods Plugin Support** One feature we never implemented is support for CocoaPods plugins, which were introduced back in 2013. This has recently come up because there's an [open PR in `cordova-common`][4] as well as a [feature request in `cordova-ios`][5] related to plugin support. Although I'm not deeply familiar with CocoaPods plugins, the [official documentation][6] suggests that supporting them involves more than simply adding a plugin definition to the `Podfile` (which is what the current PR does). It appears a `Gemfile` is also required to define and install the plugins referenced in the Podfile. As far as I'm aware, Cordova does not currently manage or generate a `Gemfile`. Supporting this would likely require us to figure out how to **create, manage, and install** dependencies with `bundler`, which introduces additional complexity. --- I'd be interested in hearing others' thoughts on this. Does it make sense to limit further CocoaPods feature development? We have already been implementing SwiftPM support in preparation for the upcoming Cordova-iOS 8 release. Looking forward to the discussion. If we should move towards an official [VOTE] thread let me know. --- **References:** [1]: https://blog.cocoapods.org/CocoaPods-Support-Plans/ [2]: https://blog.cocoapods.org/CocoaPods-Support-Plans/#how-cocoapods-is-maintained [3]: https://blog.cocoapods.org/CocoaPods-Specs-Repo [4]: https://github.com/apache/cordova-common/pull/178 [5]: https://github.com/apache/cordova-ios/issues/1256 [6]: https://guides.cocoapods.org/plugins/setting-up-plugins.html
