Your Podfile still installs. That is exactly why this is easy to postpone — and why a project with twenty-plus dependencies should start now rather than in December.

First, what actually changes

CocoaPods trunk is moving to a read-only state. In the official words:

"December 2nd 2026 — I will switch trunk to not accept new Podspecs permanently."

And from Firebase:

"Firebase 12 is the final major version published to CocoaPods, and Firebase will stop publishing new versions to CocoaPods in October 2026."

Read-only is not shut down. Existing pod versions stay downloadable, the Specs repo and CDN keep serving, and pod install keeps resolving what it resolves today.…