CocoaPods Deprecation Notice for OpenTelemetry Swift

As it was announced via CocoaPods Support Plan and via CocoaPods Spec Repository, CocoaPods is transitioning their project to maintenance mode, and cocoapods trunk is going to be read-only in a few months.

The OpenTelemetry Swift maintainers are planning to deprecate CocoaPods support for all the pods published under opentelemetry-swift and opentelemetry-swift-core.

Swift Package Manager (SPM) is now the recommended and preferred installation method for all new integrations.

We encourage existing CocoaPods users to begin planning a migration to SPM.

Why are we making this change?

Maintaining multiple package distribution systems increases the operational burden on project maintainers and contributors.

Additionally, the CocoaPods ecosystem itself has announced significant changes to its infrastructure and maintenance model, making long-term support increasingly challenging for open source projects. In turn, recently, maintaining all the podspecs, the intermittent upload issues, and other CocoaPods related problems have made CocoaPods support anything but a low-effort commitment on our end.

In recent years, Swift Package Manager has become the standard dependency management solution in the Apple ecosystem and is the primary package manager recommended by Apple.

By focusing our efforts on Swift Package Manager, we can:

• Reduce release and maintenance complexity
• Improve release reliability
• Simplify contributor workflows
• Better align with the direction of the Apple development ecosystem
• Spend more contributor and maintainer time on SDK improvements rather than distribution tooling and triages

Timeline

The milestones are still under discussion, but will likely be as follows:

What does this mean for existing users?

1. Existing CocoaPods integrations will continue to function.
2. Once CocoaPods support is officially discontinued:
   1. Previously published versions will remain available.
   2. No new SDK releases will be published to CocoaPods.
   3. We’ll leave .podspec in the repositories until further notice.
   4. New features, bug fixes, and security updates will only be available through Swift Package Manager releases.
   5. Contributors won’t invest resources into investigating or resolving issues that are specific to CocoaPods integration.

Recommended Migration Path

We recommend migrating to Swift Package Manager as soon as practical.

Swift Package Manager is fully supported and will be the only distribution mechanism moving forward.

Migration from CocoaPods to SPM is simple; there’re guides and documentation out there in the community that can be used.

Feedback

We understand that some organizations still rely on CocoaPods-based workflows.

Before finalizing the “Recommended migration period”, we would like to gather feedback from the community regarding migration challenges, tooling gaps, and operational concerns.

Please share your feedback via GitHub Issues, the CNCF Slack #otel-swift or join us in our weekly SIG Meetings.

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