"pod update" doesn't update to latest version

In my case, Neon wouldn't update for me. It turns out it was because of the deployment target.

Changed platform :ios, '8.0' to platform :ios, '10.0'

And update worked normally.

One of the reasons CocoaPods won't pick up the latest version of the pod could be another dependency that required an earlier version.

For example, suppose the latest version of PodA is 2.6 and you have this in your Podfile:

pod 'PodA', '~> 2.0'
pod 'PodB'

Unbeknown to you, PodB has the following dependency: "PodA": "~> 2.5.4"

When CocoaPods tries to satisfy the dependencies, it will reject version 2.6 of PodA because it fails to satisfy the stronger dependency constraint on PodB.

One way to troubleshoot this is to ask CocoaPods to print the internal dependency graph debugging information by setting the following environment variable prior to running "pod update"

export MOLINILLO_DEBUG=1

Installing latest cocoapods worked for me.

sudo gem install cocoapods