[maratal]

Against integration/v2 directly, not stacked on the split PRs — this is a distribution decision rather than part of the package restructure, and touches a mostly disjoint set of files.

Why

2.x ships no pod. PDR-091b2 names only a Swift Package Manager product for this SDK, and a pod would have to be a second published artifact with its own trunk ownership, publish ordering and podspec to keep in step with Package.swift.

Existing pod consumers are not stranded: the Ably pod's last release stays on the 1.x line, which is maintenance-only with security and critical fixes for its support window. To go beyond that they move to Swift Package Manager.

Two consequences worth stating, because neither is obvious:

• A pod consumer cannot declare the device side, since the declaration lives in AblyPubSubDevice, which is SPM-only. Their traffic keeps being classified by Ably's default rules for as long as they stay on 1.x. That is a real cost of this decision, not a detail.
• ably-flutter must move to Flutter's Swift Package Manager support. Its iOS plugin depends on pod 'Ably', '1.2.53' and has no Package.swift, and a podspec's s.dependency 'Ably' can only resolve against a published pod — so the pod path cannot reach 2.x at all. Its users face a breaking major regardless (renamed repo, new ably_pubsub_device package, new factory), so the build-system change lands inside a migration they are already making. Worth confirming with that owner, since PDR-091b2 marks ably-flutter as a prerequisite to schedule early.

What

• Ably.podspec deleted, along with the pod_lint Makefile target.
• Examples/Tests deleted — an example app whose only purpose was proving pod install worked, plus its step in examples.yaml and its Podfile.lock entry in .gitignore. The SPM, Carthage and push examples are untouched.
• check-pod.yaml → check-carthage.yaml. Only two of its steps concerned pods (printing the CocoaPods version, and pod lib lint); everything else builds Ably.framework.zip, which Carthage consumers install and which the release process attaches to the GitHub release. So the workflow stays and loses the lint. Its job is still named check, so no check name changes.
• Docs corrected where the change falsified them: the README's install list and CocoaPods section (replaced by a short notice), CONTRIBUTING.md's distribution table, the four reasons LiveObjects is SPM-only — three of which cited the podspec — the release process, CLAUDE.md's distribution sentence, and the parenthetical in Docs/plugins.md that named CocoaPods as a non-SPM build.

Second commit: Carthage goes too

With the pod gone, Swift Package Manager is the only channel for 2.x. The Carthage Ably.xcframework's last release stays on the 1.x line alongside the pod.

Removed: Cartfile and Cartfile.resolved, check-carthage.yaml (which the first commit had kept for exactly this artifact), the two Scripts/*carthage* helpers, every carthage_* Makefile target, and Examples/AblyCarthage with its step in examples.yaml. make update now only updates submodules.

Three things worth calling out:

• docs.yml no longer resolves Carthage dependencies before generating docs. It never needed them: jazzy.sh and generate-markdown-api-reference.py parse headers out of Source/, and no public header imports msgpack or AblyDeltaCodec, so the step was vestigial.
• The Carthage/ entry stays in .gitignore, narrowed to the whole directory. Removing it exposed a leftover local checkout to both git status and editorconfig-checker — the linter failed on third-party trailing whitespace under Carthage/Checkouts/Nimble/… until it was restored.
• Ably.xcodeproj is kept but is now dormant. It took its dependencies from Carthage/Build, so it has no way to resolve them, and nothing in CI builds its schemes. It stays because Ably.xcworkspace references it and it hosts the soak-test app; CONTRIBUTING.md now says so rather than leaving the next person to discover it. Removing it properly is a separate change.

CONTRIBUTING.md's Distribution section is rewritten rather than patched: with one channel its premise — that a release tag delivers different products to different channels — no longer holds, and three of the four reasons it gave for AblyLiveObjects being SPM-only cited the podspec or the Xcode project.

Verification

swift build clean, make parses, editorconfig clean, and a grep for Ably.podspec, Examples/Tests, check-pod and pod_lint across the tree returns nothing outside CHANGELOG.md and .github/issue_template.md — both left alone deliberately, since they describe released 1.x versions and the people filing issues about them.

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[maratal]

Closed in favour of #2282, which is the same two commits rebased onto split/uts-per-side so the whole transition is a single stack. GitHub does not allow a pull request that belongs to a tracked stack to change its base, and closing the pull request above it does not release it, so recreating was the only route. Branch dist/drop-cocoapods is unchanged as a name — it now carries the rebased commits.