Abandon all hope ye who enter here

For a while, that was my feeling when it came to using Cocoapods when writing my iOS apps in Swift.

Some would say that, even if I am quite involved in the Swift world right now (check out my latest article on raywenderlich.com on how to build an app like RunKeeper in Swift), I am not the biggest Swift advocate. And it’s mostly because of these little things like Cocoapods that used to work seamlessly and start to become a pain when you switch to Swift.

Something else I really don’t like — and that’s a personality issue I know I am probably never going to get rid of — is intrusive, unnecessary, it-just-works GUIs. Some of us were afraid of clowns, I dreaded Clippy. In these days of iOS development, that fear came back to me in a form I wouldn’t have expected: my crash reporting tool!

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some crash reports! And until XCode 7 and its new Crash Reports service are released, Crashlytics is definitely the best tool out there for your money, especially for your small and/or open source projects. Its killer feature being, let’s be honest about it, that it’s free!

My only issue was, and still is, the plugin Crashlytics wants you to use in order to “Make things simple™”…

There’s a light (over at the Frankenstein place)

Let’s cut to the chase! To all of you who ran into the same issues I ran into, this is our lucky day! Here’s how to get your Swift project set up with Crashlytics using only Cocoapods and without having to use this oh-so-magical plugin.

Adding Crashlytics via Cocoapods

I am going to assume you are all familiar with Cocoapods. So, if you haven’t set it up yet, just add a file named Podfile to the root of your project and fill it with these values:

pod 'Fabric'
pod 'Crashlytics'

Then grab your favorite terminal and type the following command:

$> pod install

If you haven’t installed Cocoapods yet, check this really simple Getting Started tutorial. Once you have done that, open the newly created [PROJECT_NAME].xcworkspace file and you should see a new Pods project there, with these two new pods inside. Unfortunately, because Crashlytics is an Objective-C library, you will need a bridging header.

Everyone loves a Bridging Header

Again, let’s assume you know your way around mix-and-matching Swift and Objective-C inside the same project. If you need more details, just check out Apple’s documentation on having Swift and Objective-C in the same project.

So, create an Objective-C header file and name it [PRODUCT_MODULE_NAME]-Bridging-Header.h. In this file, all you have to do is import Crashlytics like this:

#import <Crashlytics/Crashlytics.h>

You are ready to start using Crashlytics from your Swift code. However, if you try to build your project now, nothing will happen. It’s because you need to tell Fabric that it should start running when your app starts.

Get your API Key and Build Secret

To do so, you will have to get the API Key and Build Secret of your organization from Fabric’s dashboard. Once you have them just add the following Run Script Phase to your build phases:

${PODS_ROOT}/Fabric/Fabric.framework/run [API_KEY] [BUILD_SECRET]

Once this is done, open your AppDelegate and add the following method call to the application(application:, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions:) method:

Crashlytics.startWithAPIKey([YOUR_API_KEY])

This will start Crashlytics when your app starts.

Build & Run

That’s it! Now build and run your project and your app should directly show in your dashboard!

Wrapping Up

I hope this little tutorial helped you integrate seamlessly with Crashlytics. One of the good things is, if you want to continue using the plugin (for beta distributions for example, which works pretty well I’ll admit) you still can! This integration is 100% compatible with it!

If you have any questions or issues with what’s been told here, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @Zedenem.

Finally, I couldn’t have fixed my issues and written this article without these two resources:

• @danlew42‘s article on Setting up Crashlytics without the IDE plugin on Android
• @stevenhepting‘s answer to this Stack Overflow question on using Crashlytics without plugin via Cocoapods

Hope this will help,

Practical test

This was working as of October 2014:

• Launch the Youtube app on an iPhone
• Plug headphones
• Launch a video that has a preroll ad (depending on capping, it should be quite easy to find one that has it)
• While the ad is playing, unplug your headphones

The ad should have paused and you have no way of unpausing it or accessing the video you wanted to see. You might try to plug the headphones back but it won’t work. Now, when you do the same thing on an actual video, you get the expected behavior:

• While playing a video, unplugging headphones pauses the video and lets you unpause it
• While playing a video, plugging headphones doesn’t interrupt the video

This is explained in Apple’s documentation in a pretty straight-forward way:

You might think: “well if the player (here the Ad uses AVPlayer) paused, it should have sent a notification telling my code that its state changed. Fixing this issue is just a matter of  getting this state change and acting according to it.”

Well, if that was the case I wouldn’t have to write an article about it, would I!

The thing is, Apple’s documentation (See Audio Session Programming Guide: Responding To Route Changes) is pretty clear about the matter but nobody ever wrote a practical example on how to use Audio Output notifications to check if headphones have been plugged while playing a video.

So after digging the web, and especially Stack Overflow for a practical solution that does not exist, here is my take at it! Hope it will help!

Audio Output Route Changed Notification

Here is what iOS gives us to listen and act upon audio output route changes:

AVAudioSessionRouteChangeNotification

So, we just have to subscribe to it and we will know every time the audio output route changes. Add yourself as an observer:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(audioHardwareRouteChanged:) name:AVAudioSessionRouteChangeNotification object:nil];

Then implement the method you passed as a selector:

- (void)audioHardwareRouteChanged:(NSNotification *)notification {
    // Your tests on the Audio Output changes will go here
}

Using the notification’s user info to understand what happened

The AVAudioSessionRouteChangeNotification provides two important objects:

• An AVAudioSessionRouteDescription object containing the previous route’s description. Accessible via the key AVAudioSessionRouteChangePreviousRouteKey

• An NSNumber object containing an unsigned integer that identifies the reason why the route changed. Accessible via the key AVAudioSessionRouteChangeReasonKey

If you just want to know when the headphones were unplugged, you should use this code:

NSInteger routeChangeReason = [notification.userInfo[AVAudioSessionRouteChangeReasonKey] integerValue];
if (routeChangeReason == AVAudioSessionRouteChangeReasonOldDeviceUnavailable) {
    // The old device is unavailable == headphones have been unplugged
}

Here, you don’t need to check if the previous route were the headphones or not, because the only thing you want to know (and the logic behind iOS pausing the video when the headphones are unplugged) is this: When the device used for output becomes unavailable, pause.

This is great because that means your code will also work in other cases, like if you use bluetooth headphones and you walk out of range of the app, or their batteries die. Also, it won’t pause when you plug headphones back, because this is considered by the OS as a new device becoming available, sending the reason AVAudioSessionRouteChangeReasonNewDeviceAvailable

To go further

The AVAudioSessionRouteChangeNotification‘s associated user info is full of interesting data on what happened to the audio output route, and the different routes available and recognized by iOS. Be sure to check Apple’s documentation and especially:

• Audio Session Programming Guide: Responding to Route Changes
• AVAudioSessionRouteChangeNotification Documentation

From there, you should be able to access all the documentation you need to, for example, detect when the device is connected to a docking station, etc.

Hope this will help,