Our dilemma is that Cocoapods is simply an option, not the *only* option. Because of this, we also need to worry about duplicate symbols when we ship a compiled version of our binary.

We kept our dependencies light, and we wrapped AFNetworking with custom namespacing using the strategy alloy recommended.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21249273/prevent-duplicate-symbols-when-building-static-library-with-cocoapods