Regarding your first question: using the CocoaPods daemon.
Its advantages:
- makes downloading and setting up of dependencies as easy as it would on Mac.
- works with 90% of projects.
- mimics the way it works on macOS.
Its drawbacks:
- slows down your builds a lot because it recompiles everything from source, i.e. not only your project but also the dependencies it downloads for you
- fails with 10% of projects (namely, those that use pods written in mixed languages, and those that run complex non-portable POSIX shell scripts to set up resources)
- costs an extra $.
If you're a complete newbie, don't mind having longer build times and would prefer an automatic tool for handling your Xcode project dependencies, go for the CocoaPods daemon. If you're a knowledgeable user, or one who prefers faster builds, or are short on money, go without it.
Regarding your second question : these tabs are what Xcode calls the "targets" of your Xcode project. They are equivalent to "projects" in Visual Studio terminology. In Apple's language, a "project" has several "targets" just like at Microsoft, a "solution" has several "projects". Think different, etc...
*edit* about the Discord server, the reason is that my programming work is done best when I can concentrate over long periods of time, and I want to choose when I can be disturbed. There wouldn't be less wait time if people were waiting for my reply on Discord than on e.g. this forum. I do my best to provide help to everybody but because of my independent programmer activity, I must deliver various things (most often totally unrelated with this toolchain) to various customers and I have very, very little free time :-/