What is the advantage of using CocoaPods

There are many pros of using Cocoapod over manually managing Dependencies in your project. You begin working on a project and everything is going great (It could be a solo project or a team project). As the project progresses, you find it necessary to use third party libraries to help the project move along faster (the whole ‘do not reinvent the wheel’ thing). You do this by searching for appropriate libraries and copying the source code into your project. I list few of them

• A lib may refer another dependency which Cocoapod will take care itself. Manually you would have to download each one of them.
• Lib has certain requirements like OS version, framework imports etc. Manual framework adding were a pain in Objective C.. swift doesn’t have it. Cocoapod were a beast therefore back then.
• Manually added dependency might not be easy to find for another coder. Pods ensure that one can go through the pods scheme or Podfile to understand what you have used.
• Replacing a lib with new version is a pain manually when you have to delete prev files and add new – too many clicks. pod install will do it automatically using one command.

Also keeping aside the initial setup of pod in a project, all other steps of adding libraries is easier than the technical knowledge required to add a Lib manually.