Difference between pod 'FirebaseAnalytics' and pod 'Firebase/Analytics' in CocoaPods?

Question

I recently came across two different ways of specifying Firebase Analytics(or other Firebase products) in a CocoaPods Podfile:

pod 'FirebaseAnalytics'

pod 'Firebase/Analytics'

I found information suggesting that the second one is a subspec, while the first is a standalone pod. However, I'm not entirely clear on how CocoaPods works. Can someone explain if there is a difference between these two syntaxes, and if so, what is it?

Additionally, I noticed that when using them, they seem to pull different dependencies. Could someone elaborate on the differences in dependencies that these two syntaxes might introduce?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

'Firebase/Analytics' is an alias, it doesn't contain any own sources and actually depends on FirebaseAnalytics.

If you look at their respective Podspecs (1, 2) you'll notice that Firebase/Analytics depends on Firebase/Core, which in return depends on FirebaseAnalytics.

But there's a trick - both pods are updated separately. For example, if you install Firebase/Analytics at the time of writing (01/16/24) you'll have version 10.19.0 installed, but if you use FirebaseAnalytics instead you'll have 10.20.0. And my guess is FirebaseAnalytics is updated faster in general, since Firebase/Analytics is a subspec and only gets updates once all of its subspecs' dependencies get their updates.