[FR]: Add support for SPM, binary distro

[jesus-mg-ios]

Description

@ncooke3 made a great progress introducing firestore as binary distribution through firebase.
Good progress, but we need the distro of all related to firebase iOS in that way.

Because it's time consuming in CIs and in local to build third party code, that should be pre-compiled to plug and play.

Thanks.

API Proposal

No response

Firebase Product(s)

AB Testing, Analytics, App Check, App Distribution, Authentication, Crashlytics, Database, DynamicLinks, Functions, In-App Messaging, Installations, ML Model Downloader, Messaging, Performance, Remote Config, Storage

[google-oss-bot]

I couldn't figure out how to label this issue, so I've labeled it for a human to triage. Hang tight.

[mbernson]

+1 to this!

Someone already did the work of putting up a GitHub repository that mirrors the Firebase binaries: https://github.com/akaffenberger/firebase-ios-sdk-xcframeworks

I've used this in the last app that I made, and was really satisfied by how well it worked. Builds are much faster (both locally and on CI) and Xcode doesn't need to index all of the Firebase source code.

It would be great if Google would host the binaries so I don't have to trust a third-party mirror. In fact, why not make it the default. It would save many millions of collective CI-minutes (and carbon emissions with that!) that are spent compiling the Firebase SDK and its dependencies each time.

Google already hosts XCFrameworks for another product: the Google Maps iOS SDK. (Which is closed source)
You can see it in the Podfile

[mthormann-dhi]

+1 as well!

Enabling a binary distribution would cut at least 25-30 seconds off every full build (for a typical M1 mac in our environment) and dramatically simplify the work the build system would have to do during compilation. It would also cut down greatly on the SPM package resolution wasted time when starting Xcode, etc.

While it's really wonderful to be able to see the Firebase source code, 99% of the time, it's simply not necessary. If we still had a source code distro to fall back to, we could still use that in a pinch if we needed to step into Firebase code for some reason.

[scsinke]

+1 on this

Lottie already does this in a separate repository. Maybe firebase can add one as well.

[mathaeus]

Is there any updates if the Firebase team will eventually work on this @paulb777? I'm asking since the linked issue had a discussion going on which eventually died off because the issue was locked.

As pointed out by others a lot of developers would greatly benefit from this. Our main motivation is to reduce SPM cache size and therefore speed up build times.

[mthormann-dhi]

We just wound up punting and going with the manual install at this point. Little frustrating as we'll have to script as well as manually check every Firebase update for new/changed frameworks though. Definitely will lead to slower adoption of Firebase updates given the extra effort involved. SPM solution would be better and more reliable/stable.

UPDATE: Take that back. We got bit by the issue with SwiftUI previews and are unfortunately reverting to SPM till this request gets resolved.

[jesus-mg-ios]

Are there any updates about it @ncooke3?

[ncooke3]

Hi @jesus-mg-ios, no updates to share at this time.

---

Also, @mthormann-dhi, ICYMI, the Promises issue you linked to has since been fixed.

[paulb777]

One usability factor slowing this down is that there is no way to support both Xcode 14 and Xcode 15 with a single binary installation and also support VisionOS early adopters.

[mthormann-dhi]

@paulb777 Maybe stupid question then related to your response but wouldn't the zip file with the .xcframework files that we pull when installing manually need to be updated with different versions as well? I'm just seeing one set of files currently. Or is that just an issue specific to deploying binaries w/SPM?