React native – CocoaPods install fails after Firebase push notification was added to the project

We recently integrated Firebase into our React Native Expo project, but now our build pipelines are failing during the CocoaPods installation step.

The error we’re encountering is:

[!] The following Swift pods cannot yet be integrated as static libraries:
The Swift pod FirebaseCoreInternal depends upon GoogleUtilities, which does not define modules. To opt into those targets generating module maps (which is necessary to import them from Swift when building as static libraries), you may set use_modular_headers! globally in your Podfile, or specify :modular_headers => true for particular dependencies.

To address this issue, we updated our app.json to include the following configuration:

{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": [
      [
        "expo-build-properties",
        {
          "ios": {
            "useFrameworks": "static"
          }
        }
      ]
    ]
  }
}

This works perfectly on local builds, but when running the build on our Azure pipeline, it fails with the same CocoaPods error.

We also tried adding these to our pod file but it does not seem to have any affect

  pod 'Firebase/Analytics'
  pod 'Firebase/Auth'
  pod 'Firebase/Messaging'
  pod 'GoogleUtilities', :modular_headers => true

Has anyone faced a similar issue, or does anyone have suggestions on how to resolve this for CI pipelines?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!