Publish a Carthage-compatible xcframework

[blimmer]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We use fastlane to build our application on a CircleCI macos.m1.large.gen1 executor. Compiling the amplify-swift package alone with a cold cache takes around 3 minutes 40 seconds.

Caching SPM packages is challenging because the built packages are stored in the DerivedData folder, and developing a reliable cache-busting technique is not straightforward.

Describe the solution you'd like

If this package provided a prebuilt xcframework, we could use a tool like Carthage to pull the prebuilt framework instead of building it ourselves.

Another project in your GitHub organization, https://github.com/aws-amplify/aws-sdk-ios, already publishes a Carthage-compatible xcframework file to each Github Release (e.g., https://github.com/aws-amplify/aws-sdk-ios/releases/tag/2.33.8):

Following a similar process for this package would significantly improve our user experience by reducing compile times.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I have tried using Carthage to produce an archive, but have run into problems.

# Cartfile
github "aws-amplify/amplify-swift" ~>2.25.3

But when I run carthage update, I receive a build-time error:

/Users/blimmer/MY_REPO/Carthage/Checkouts/amplify-swift/AmplifyTools/AmplifyXcode/AmplifyXcode.xcodeproj: warning: The iOS deployment target 'IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET' is set to 9.0, but the range of supported deployment target versions is 12.0 to 17.2.99. (in target 'ProjectSpec' from project 'AmplifyXcode')

I'm not a seasoned iOS developer, so I'm not sure how/if I could work around this issue. A Github Code Search for people using Carthage with this package makes me think that others have not been able to make this work either. To be clear, I'm not looking for support on Carthage in this forum, I'm just providing context on what other steps I've tried.

Is the feature request related to any of the existing Amplify categories?

No response

Additional context

@phantumcode mentioned in #3015 (comment) that xcframeworks was not a viable distribution method for this repository. However, since a related project, the AWS SDK for iOS has implemented this behavior since 2021 (see aws-amplify/aws-sdk-ios#3348 (comment)), I wanted to bring this up again for discussion.

[github-actions]

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[thisisabhash]

Thank you for posting this. Our team will discuss and post updates here.

[sebaland]

After doing research and discussions with the team, we concluded that distributing the Amplify Library for Swift as an XCFramework is not feasible at the moment, mostly due to the existing limitations when classes and modules share the same name and the significant effort it would take to work around that.

The mentioned AWS SDK for iOS is a completely different product that is mostly self contained, unlike Amplify which has other dependencies that would need to be handled as well.

[github-actions]

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