Support Cocoapods until end of 2026

[ospfranco]

Hi @AndyQ. First of all, thanks a lot for the library! This has saved us a bunch of time.

I would like to ask to not drop cocoapods for the latest versions until end of 2026. You are absolutely right Cocoapods development has been frozen and is currently in life support mode only. However, there are tools that depend on it and are not ready to migrate to SPM yet, such as Flutter and React Native. Me and my client have a React Native app and I've been trying to use a SPM dep but it messes up with a lot of other libraries (vision-camera as a RN only dep or Google MLKit for OCR scanning the passport MRZ, which requires to be statically linked). Migrations are in process but you can imagine this is a big big effort and things are not there yet.

Therefore, it would be useful to have the latest versions available until Cocoapods is really retired and trunk is read-only.

In the meantime I've forked the repo and published a newer version under OP_NFCPassportReader. This contains some critical fixes we need and we cannot wait for:

• Latest OpenSSL version (comes from 2.2.0)
• Customizable AA Challenge https://github.com/AndyQ/NFCPassportReader/pull/227

If you agree to release the latest versions again on cocoapods I will deprecate my fork. Thanks a lot

[AndyQ]

Am happy to continue to release also to Cocoapods until end of 2026 however please note - this will be an unsupported deployment mechanism.

[AndyQ]

This is been released as 2.3.0