It takes time to build the app for iOS

[El-Tommy]

When trying to run cordova build ios while installing the firebasex plugin I noticed that it takes more than 5 minutes to complete the build.
But if I remove the plugin the build takes less than 1 minute.

Is this behavior normal or could there be a problem with my machine?

[ndrake]

I'm seeing similar behavior with our app when upgrading to v16.0.0-cli. I haven't attempted to reproduce with the cordova-plugin-firebasex-test project yet. Our app using v14.2.1-cli, averaged an iOS build time of 1 minute 22 seconds. With v16.0.0-cli the average build time is 5 minutes 11 seconds.

If I get some time, I'll attempt to recreate with cordova-plugin-firebasex-test, but I'm not sure when I'll have time to do that.

[El-Tommy]

Would the v14.2.1-cli and v16.0.0-cli be your Node or NPM version?

[ndrake]

Would the v14.2.1-cli and v16.0.0-cli be your Node or NPM version?

Those are the versions of this plugin that I'm using.

[El-Tommy]

I confirmed, my plugin version is also ^16.0.0.

[dpa99c]

The cause of longer build times on iOS when using v16+ of this plugin is because it now defaults to using the official (uncompiled) Firestore pod from the Firebase SDK, instead of the (unofficial) pre-compiled version (in v15 and below).
This is because of an issue with using the latest version of the pre-compiled pod in a Cordova build environment.
See #782 and invertase/firestore-ios-sdk-frameworks#62 (comment)

[El-Tommy]

Thanks for the answer.
I think with that it is possible to close this issue.

[roman-rr]

Such increases in building time make rapid development quite difficult.
What do you think @dpa99c, will firebase-sdk come back to the pre-compiled version?
Or maybe is a good time to switch to capacitor development (I guess there is building time much faster than cordova)?

[dpa99c]

@roman-rr The increased iOS build time is due to compiling the Firestore component of the Firebase SDK.
Cordova/Capacitor are only wrappers around the native Webview that enable a webapp to be deployed as a native app.
Therefore switching to Capacitor will not speed up the build.