It’s been a few months since Apple released the first iDevices to feature 64-bit support. While many developers have embraced the impending 64-bit future, not all third party libraries support this architecture yet, including those installable via CocoaPods.

Despite the lack of universal 64-bit support among 3rd-party pods, CocoaPods still includes the arm64 architecture (via ARCHS_STANDARD_INCLUDING_64_BIT) in its generated targets’ build settings. This can cause problems if your app’s dependencies don’t support arm64, or you only want to build for armv7 and armv7s for other reasons.

Fortunately, there’s a quick and easy automated fix. Just add the following to the bottom of your Podfile to revert the ARCHS build setting to ARCHS_STANDARD:

# Remove 64-bit build architecture from Pods targets
post_install do |installer|
  installer.project.targets.each do |target|
    target.build_configurations.each do |configuration|
      target.build_settings(configuration.name)['ARCHS'] = '$(ARCHS_STANDARD_32_BIT)'
    end
  end
end

To test, target the “iPhone Retina (4-inch 64-bit)” simulator and build.

Update: The latest Xcode 5.1 beta redefined ARCHS_STANDARD to include arm64. I’ve updated the code above with a fix.