I was reading through this post by @John O'Reilly and was wondering if there is a genuine reason you would have both cocoapods and swift package publishing for your iOS app? (Android developer here trying his hand out on iOS so pardon the lack of knowledge on my part)

They're mostly there to show some of the options you have.....may be case perhaps that some people in team consume as published package and others build from source.

I'm assuming there's no answer to "what's the best thing to use?" I'm also an android dev and coming to ios from KMM is interesting because I don't know if I should choose cocoapods, swift, or the "regular framework". Here's the KMM wizard for example:

I think at least one key distinction here is whether you build from source (using those CocoaPods/framework options for example that you get if using say KMM plugin)....or if you want to publish shared code as binary. I think the general consensus is that the first approach is preferable but there's definitely scenarios where publishing can make sense. Pretty sure there isn't one right answer here.....factors such as team size, composition, code ownership etc come in to play.

I first tried CocoaPods since it's recommended, but found it overly complex and not so good working as the regular framework which I use now. Swift Packages is a nice option, but for now I don't see how I can use that with private projects.

I’ve integrated with cocoapods but i’ve found that running builds is slower (presumably because gradle has to build the shared codebase). Is there an option to not build gradle if nothing has changed ?