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.

Yes! I'm a little biased as someone who worked briefly on CocoaPods, but it was an indispensable tool for many years. This is evident by its massive popularity.

Like with NPM, many people ran into issues ultimately rooted in not understanding the tool. CocoaPods had the extra constraint that correctly setting up a Ruby environment was hard. If you used Ruby with a fixed ruby version, bundler with a Gemfile.lock and then CocoaPods it worked well.

No pods are an absolute misery and at best a concrete example of what not to do. So at least there's that.

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.

It may not have been great, but it was certainly better than the likely alternative (no package management at all for iOS development).

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.

Better than the "current" future

No.

Absolutely No.

No.