Managing third party code on iOS has always been a pain. In the past 9 years or so I’ve done everything from dragging source directly into projects, to Git submodules, to CocoaPods, to Carthage, to Git submodules again. Right now I’m using CocoaPods.
I’ve had three problems with CocoaPods from the beginning:
- It messes with my Xcode project files.
- It stops working for me all the time.
- I don't want to mess around with Ruby gems.
While the first issue seems pretty much intractable, the CocoaPods app seems to (potentially) fix the second two by bundling its own Ruby environment in the app. Because it’s from the people who make CocoaPods, I assume it’ll keep updated to match the command line tool.
The app itself is pretty barebones. I’d love to see a future version let me see what updates are available for my pods from within the app and abstract away me having to edit the podfile by hand. Either way, I’m going to give it a shot. You can check it out on the CocoaPods website.
