Flutter - Firebase - iOS

Improve Flutter iOS Build Time  When Using Firestore

Slow builds whether locally or in the CI reduces developer productivity. If you integrated Firestore in your Flutter app, chances are, you may have experienced slow builds in your apps.

Joshua de Guzman &

Jul 9, 2022 - 2 min read

Improve Flutter iOS Build Time  When Using Firestore — Photo by Yancy Min / Unsplash

Slow builds, whether locally or in the CI, reduce developer productivity. If you integrated Firestore into your Flutter app, you might have experienced slow build times in your apps.

There have been issues that outline the slow build times developers experience when Firestore is added as a dependency:

These issues affect the speed of getting out builds to testers and users, and it's also expensive to pay for macOS CI machines on the cloud.

Use pre-compiled Firestore iOS SDK

The issue is caused by the 500k+ lines of mostly C++, which gets compiled as part of the Xcode build process and takes a long time.

The precompiled Firestore iOS SDK solves this problem. It includes xcframework files extracted from the Firebase iOS SDK repository are released and tagged using the Firebase iOS SDK versions.

Find your Firebase iOS SDK version

Locate the ios/Podfile.lock file.

In the cloud_firestore dependency, check for the Firebase SDK version in the Firebase/Firestore line:

PODS:
  - cloud_firestore (3.2.1):
    - Firebase/Firestore (= 9.2.0) 
    - firebase_core
    - Flutter

ios/Podfile.lock

9.2.0 is the Firebase SDK version of this project.

See supported versions for the precompiled Firestore iOS SDK.

Update your Podfile

In your ios/Podfile, reference the precompiled Firestore iOS SDK git repository inside your Runner target:

target 'Runner' do
  use_frameworks!
  use_modular_headers!

  flutter_install_all_ios_pods File.dirname(File.realpath(__FILE__))

  # Add this line
  pod 'FirebaseFirestore', :git => 'https://github.com/invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks.git', :tag => '9.2.0'
end

ios/Podfile

Remove ios/Podfile.lock.

Last, run flutter packages get.

That's it!