Why doesn't Carthage support iOS 7?

Question

Carthage is awesome. I really want to try it in my project. But due to dynamic frameworks that are only supported on iOS 8, Carthage does not official support iOS 7 or earlier.

Is there any workaround to make it support iOS 7?

Answer 1

Sorry, no. Dynamic frameworks are a huge part of Carthage’s simplicity, and it cannot be easily changed to support a different mechanism.

For example, dynamic frameworks allow Carthage to deduplicate nested dependencies, providing a single copy of every framework that you should link into your app.

With static linking, this would be impossible, because each dependency would be copying its own dependencies already (resulting in duplicate symbols).