Compile Protobuf for iOS

Written by: niklas | Posted on: 02-05-2012

For a project I'm doing at work, that I hope will eventually be open source, I needed to have protobuf compiled for iOS. A colleague of mine showed me how it had been compiled on iOS 4, using these scripts, but with iOS 5 I ended up with binaries compiled for the arm architecture instead of the armv7 architecture.

Be aware that the iOS 5 SDK actually ships with a version of protobuf, but it's a bit old, being version 2003001. And it only ships the binary, not the headers.

To compile protobuf, grab the latest source (which is 2.4.1 at the time of writing this) and run the following script (download script):

After running this, you should have a directory called /tmp/protobuf/arm that is compiled for your iPhone or iPad with the armv7 architecture. Copy that into your project and start using protobuf