The difference to me is that under iOS, you can go without these things (third party libs, Cocoapods/Carthage) and still be OK — you'll be at a relatively minor inconvenience, not ripping your hair out. Particularly with your example of Alamofire/AFNetworking, there's not a ton of functionality you're missing out on if you instead use NSURLSession, since they're both just light wrappers around it. This wasn't always true, but Apple recognized the gap in functionality and fixed it.

I have multiple personal Obj-C/Swift projects on iOS and macOS that don't use any kind of dependency management and use very few third party libraries and working on them has never been an issue or source of pain.

Actually, I make a point in my iOS projects to avoid third party libraries wherever possible. The first-party SDK is good enough that the dependency cost of libraries like Alamofire is usually not worth it. I had to do some Android development not too long ago, and I felt like I had entered some crazy la-la land until I found a bunch of third party infrastructure like Kotlin, RXJava and a pile of libraries to make life bearable.

> Actually, I make a point in my iOS projects to avoid third party libraries wherever possible.

Thats not a bragging point.

DRY can be taken to extremes. It is ok to sometimes write code yourself than to tie yourself and depend on some other library by "some guy". The whole NPM "left pad" debacle is proof of that.

What matters is the out of the box experience.