This is correct. Starting with iOS 8 they finally allowed linking against custom frameworks which is why Carthage is now becoming much more popular. CocoaPods solved a critical problem of getting dependencies linked in, while creating a new problem of having your xcodeproj file and build settings be managed by them. I'll be happy enough to drop them for new projects going forward.
> Starting with iOS 8 they finally allowed linking against custom frameworks
I don't keep up with iOS development enough to know if anything has changed with respect to static/dynamic linking in iOS 8, but it has always been possible to use custom frameworks in iOS (eg, frameworks you build yourself, unless the community has another definition for 'custom framework').
The framework directory structure is a bit unorthodox, but it's really just your statically built library (absent any '.a' suffix) alongside any header files in a Headers folder. Again, not sure if this has changed with any support for dynamic linking.
