CocoaPods is a dependency manager for iOS and OSX projects that allows developers to easily install and update libraries and frameworks. It has had over 683 million downloads since 2009 and supports over 40,000 libraries. To use CocoaPods, developers install it using the gem command, generate a Podfile to declare dependencies, run pod install to download dependencies, and open the generated Xcode workspace to begin coding. CocoaPods also provides tools for creating, validating, and publishing new library specifications.