Firebase Apple Open Source Development

See the subsections below for details about the different installation methods. Where available, it's recommended to install libraries with a Swift suffix to get the best experience when writing your app in Swift.

• Swift Package Manager
• CocoaPods
• Install from GitHub
• Experimental Carthage
• Framework or library

Swift Package Manager installation

Find instructions for installing using Swift Package Manager in the Firebase get started documentation.

CocoaPods installation

Find instructions for installing with CocoaPods (pod install) in the Firebase installation options documentation.

Note: To accommodate the read-only announcement from CocoaPods, Firebase will stop publishing new versions to CocoaPods in October 2026. Learn more.

Install from GitHub

You can install from GitHub to access the Firebase repo at other branches, tags, or commits.

Background

For instructions and options about overriding pod source locations, see the Podfile Syntax Reference.

Access Firebase source snapshots

All official releases are tagged in this repo and available via CocoaPods. To access a local source snapshot or unreleased branch, use Podfile directives. Here are some example directives which use FirebaseFirestore as the example library.

To access FirebaseFirestore via a branch:

pod 'FirebaseCore', :git => 'https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk.git', :branch => 'main'
pod 'FirebaseFirestore', :git => 'https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk.git', :branch => 'main'

To access FirebaseFirestore via a checked-out version of the firebase-ios-sdk repo:

pod 'FirebaseCore', :path => '/path/to/firebase-ios-sdk'
pod 'FirebaseFirestore', :path => '/path/to/firebase-ios-sdk'

Carthage (iOS only)

Find instructions for the experimental Carthage distribution (iOS only) at Carthage.md within this repo.

Use Firebase from a Framework or a library

Find details about using Firebase from a Framework or a library at firebase_in_libraries.md within this repo.

Firebase provides official beta support for macOS, Catalyst, and tvOS. visionOS and watchOS are community supported. Thanks to community contributions for many of the multi-platform PRs.

At this time, most Firebase products are available across Apple platforms. There are still a few gaps, especially on visionOS and watchOS. For details about the current support matrix, see this chart in the Firebase documentation.

visionOS

Where supported, visionOS works as expected with the exception of Firestore via Swift Package Manager where it is required to use the source distribution.

To enable the Firestore source distribution, quit Xcode and open the desired project from the command line with the FIREBASE_SOURCE_FIRESTORE environment variable: open --env FIREBASE_SOURCE_FIRESTORE /path/to/project.xcodeproj. To go back to using the binary distribution of Firestore, quit Xcode and open Xcode like normal, without the environment variable.

watchOS

Thanks to contributions from the community, many of Firebase SDKs now compile, run unit tests, and work on watchOS. See the Independent Watch App Sample.

Keep in mind that watchOS is not officially supported by Firebase. While we can catch basic unit test issues with GitHub Actions, there may be some changes where the SDK no longer works as expected on watchOS. If you encounter this, please file an issue.

During app setup in the console, you may get to a step that mentions something like "Checking if the app has communicated with our servers". This relies on FirebaseAnalytics and will not work on watchOS. It's safe to ignore the message and continue, the rest of the SDKs will work as expected.

Additional Crashlytics notes for watchOS

Using Crashlytics with watchOS has limited support. Due to watchOS restrictions, mach exceptions and signal crashes are not recorded. (Crashes in SwiftUI are generated as mach exceptions, so will not be recorded).

Thanks to contributions from the community, FirebaseCombineSwift contains support for Apple's Combine framework. This module is currently under development and not yet supported for use in production environments. For more details, see the docs within this repo.

See Roadmap for more about the Firebase Apple SDK Open Source plans and directions.