🚨 Upcoming Breaking Change: Making OpenTelemetry Tracing Optional to Reduce Dependencies

[dayaffe]

Update: we are re-evaluating the approach to be used for this change, and we no longer plan to make it on August 27, 2025. We will update here when we have decided on how to approach this, with a goal to make the development process as easy as possible for all customers.

What's Changing?

Based on community feedback, we're thinking of making OpenTelemetry tracing opt-in to improve Xcode performance. The opentelemetry-swift dependency and its 20+ transitive dependencies significantly slow down Xcode package resolution, even though most aren't compiled (see discussion #1990).

Important: If any systems are currently using Tracing in production, it would stop working without taking the required action below.

Action Required

If you're using OpenTelemetry Tracing, set this environment variable:

export AWS_SWIFT_SDK_ENABLE_OPENTELEMETRY=1

Ex: For development, launch Xcode from Terminal:

export AWS_SWIFT_SDK_ENABLE_OPENTELEMETRY=1
open -a Xcode YourProject.xcodeproj

Impact

• Without the flag: OpenTelemetry will no longer be added as a target and Tracing will be unavailable. Reduces dependencies in Xcode from 26 to 3.
• With the flag: Current behavior, with tracing features available.

Timeline

Anticipated Release date: August 27th 2025 TBD

Please share feedback or concerns below. We want to ensure this improves the developer experience while minimizing disruption for existing users.