How to speed-up Cloud Firestore Xcode builds on your Flutter apps

One long-standing issue with Cloud Firestore is that Flutter Xcode builds take a long time, especially on CI environments. This is because the Firestore iOS depends on 500k lines of mostly C++ code, that are compiled from scratch as part of the Xcode build.

Fortunately, a solution is now available and documented here:

• [Update] Cloud Firestore Xcode Build Times

To speed up your build times, you can use invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks, which contains precompiled Firestore iOS SDKs extracted from the Firebase iOS SDK release downloads.

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To take advantage of this, follow these two steps:

1. Find which version of the Firestore iOS SDK is in use

You can do so by opening the ios/Podfile.lock and searching for cloud_firestore.

You should find something like this:

  - cloud_firestore (3.1.4):
    - Firebase/Firestore (= 8.9.0)
    - firebase_core
    - Flutter

Make a note of the Firebase/Firestore version (8.9.0 in this case).

2. Use the precompiled Firestore iOS SDK

Open the Podfile inside the ios folder, then add this line inside your target 'Runner' do block:

target 'Runner' do
  pod 'FirebaseFirestore', :git => 'https://github.com/invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks.git', :tag => '8.9.0'

# ...
end

Note: the first time you try this, you may get this error log:

[!] CocoaPods could not find compatible versions for pod "FirebaseFirestore":
  In snapshot (Podfile.lock):
    FirebaseFirestore (= 8.9.1, ~> 8.9.0)
  In Podfile:
    FirebaseFirestore (from `https://github.com/invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks.git`, tag `8.9.0`)
None of your spec sources contain a spec satisfying the dependencies: `FirebaseFirestore (from `https://github.com/invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks.git`, tag `8.9.0`), FirebaseFirestore (= 8.9.1, ~> 8.9.0)`.
You have either:
 * out-of-date source repos which you can update with `pod repo update` or with `pod install --repo-update`.
 * mistyped the name or version.
 * not added the source repo that hosts the Podspec to your Podfile.

This is solved by removing ios/Podfile.lock and rebuilding.

You're welcome! 😎