CocoaPods iOS Library Scraper

Scrape CocoaPods — the dependency manager behind hundreds of thousands of iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS libraries — without an API key, without a login and without a proxy. Give the Actor a list of pod names and get back the complete version history, first and latest release dates, version counts and the maintainers behind each library, as clean JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

Perfect for iOS dependency research, library discovery, open-source intelligence and developer tooling that needs reliable, structured package data instead of scraped HTML.

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What this Actor does

For every pod you pass in, the Actor queries the official public CocoaPods trunk API and returns one dataset row containing:

• The full published version list (capped at 100 version strings per row)
• The latest version and the total number of released versions
• The first release and latest release timestamps, normalised to ISO-8601 UTC
• The pod owners / maintainers and how many there are
• The canonical cocoapods.org URL for the library

Because it hits a documented JSON API rather than rendering pages, runs are fast, cheap and datacenter-friendly — no residential proxies needed.

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Use cases

Use case	How this Actor helps
iOS dependency research	Audit which pods in your Podfile are still actively released and which have gone stale.
Library discovery	Compare candidate libraries by release cadence, version count and maintainer depth before you adopt one.
Open-source intelligence	Track maintainer changes, release velocity and abandonment signals across the Apple ecosystem.
Developer tooling	Feed dashboards, internal package catalogues, SBOM tooling or Slack alerts with fresh CocoaPods metadata.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	pods	What to scrape. Currently pods: look up each pod name and return its versions and owners.
pods	array	["Alamofire", "SDWebImage", "SnapKit"]	Pod names exactly as published on cocoapods.org (case-sensitive). Full pod URLs are accepted too.
maxItems	integer	100	Cap on how many pods are scraped and pushed. Maximum 1000.

Example input

{
  "mode": "pods",
  "pods": ["Alamofire", "SDWebImage", "SnapKit", "Kingfisher", "Realm"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

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Output

One dataset item per pod:

{
  "name": "Alamofire",
  "latest_version": "5.9.1",
  "version_count": 99,
  "first_release": "2015-01-09T22:10:57+00:00",
  "latest_release": "2024-03-31T01:24:57+00:00",
  "versions": ["1.1.3", "1.1.4", "1.1.5", "..."],
  "owners": ["Christian Noon", "Kevin Harwood", "Jon Shier"],
  "owner_count": 3,
  "url": "https://cocoapods.org/pods/Alamofire",
  "source": "cocoapods",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T12:14:48+00:00"
}

Field reference

Field	Description
name	Pod name as published on CocoaPods.
latest_version	Name of the last version entry returned by the trunk API.
version_count	Number of published (non-deleted) versions.
first_release	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the first version entry.
latest_release	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the last version entry.
versions	List of version strings, capped at the first 100.
owners	Maintainer display names registered on CocoaPods trunk.
owner_count	Number of maintainers.
url	Canonical https://cocoapods.org/pods/<name> page.
source	Always cocoapods.
scraped_at	When the row was produced.

All fields are nullable — if CocoaPods omits a value, you get null instead of a crash.

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Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 pods scraped, plus Apify platform usage. The Actor runs on 512 MB and needs no proxy, so runs are inexpensive: a full audit of a 200-pod Podfile costs about ten cents.

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Notes & limitations

• Pod names are case-sensitive. Alamofire works, alamofire returns nothing.
• Data comes from the public CocoaPods trunk API (trunk.cocoapods.org/api/v1/pods/{pod}), which exposes version history and owners. Richer podspec fields (license, homepage, platform requirements, summary) are not available from this endpoint — they live in per-version podspec files in the CocoaPods Specs repository. This Actor deliberately ships the reliable, key-free subset rather than a fragile spec-repo crawl.
• The cocoapods.org/api/v1/pods?query= search path returns the HTML site, not JSON, so keyword search is not offered.
• Versions are returned in the order the trunk API provides them (broadly semantic-version order, which is not always strictly chronological for parallel release branches).
• Unknown pods are logged and skipped; if no pod resolves, the run fails loudly so you notice bad input.

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Related Actors

• npms Search Scraper — npm package search and metadata
• pkg.go.dev Scraper — Go module discovery
• Hex.pm Scraper — Elixir/Erlang package data
• Anaconda Scraper — conda package intelligence

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Legal

This Actor only reads publicly available data from the official CocoaPods trunk API. Owner display names are published by maintainers themselves on a public registry; e-mail addresses returned by the API are not written to the dataset. Use the output in line with CocoaPods' terms and applicable data-protection law.