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I support a suite of related iOS apps, some of which make use of extensions (WatchKit and Today Widget). All of these apps and extensions make use of a shared private framework I've built up over time for handling certain workflows around authentication and common business logic. This framework is maintained as a private pod.

Recently, I've run into a problem where I'd like to add a method to the framework that's only really useful for the iOS apps (extensions don't need it) that uses certain APIs that are unavailable to extensions (such as [UIApplication sharedApplicaion]). I'd like to get the usual benefit of shared code, where this is implemented in only one place (the shared framework) for all my various apps to leverage. However, I can't find a way to conditionally include that method for just the apps and not the extensions without getting a compile-time error.

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Normal recommendations around this problem usually suggest the use of a preprocessor macro to opt-out around the problematic code if desired, but that doesn't really work for a shared framework situation. Macros are applied at compile-time, so the shared framework is either going to include that method, or not, and there doesn't seem to be a runtime solution to optionally exclude it. If it's included, the extensions can't compile. If it's not included, my apps can't make use of the feature.

I also started investigating if there was some way that Cocoapods could automatically make two versions of the framework, one to be used by the apps, and one by the extensions, but this would seem to introduce problems around duplicate symbols, and generally doesn't seem supported.

Are there any other suggestions for how to handle this, apart from just extracting out the problematic functionality into a different framework? (I really would prefer to just share one)

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  • No one has posted an answer yet, but I was forced to temporarily work around this by dropping down to handling this via runtime "respondsToSelector/performSelector" calls. – beno Nov 21 '16 at 19:55

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